Man or Matter by Ernst Lehrs
page 56 of 488 (11%)
page 56 of 488 (11%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
sometimes fell to twitching even when the sky was quite clear and there
was no sign of thunder. His natural conclusion was that this must be due to hitherto unnoticed electrical changes in the atmosphere. Observations maintained for hours every day, however, led to no conclusive result; when twitchings did occur it was only with some of the specimens, and even then there was no discoverable cause. Then it happened one day that Galvani, 'tired out with fruitless watching', took hold of one of the brass hooks by which the specimens were hung, and pressed it more strongly than usual against the iron railing. Immediately a twitching took place. 'I was almost at the point of ascribing the occurrence to atmospheric electricity,' Galvani tells us. All the same he took one of the specimens, a frog, into his laboratory and there subjected it to similar conditions by putting it on an iron plate, and pressing against this with the hook that was stuck through its spinal cord. Immediately the twitching occurred again. He tried with other metals and, for checking purposes, with non-metals as well. With some ingenuity he fixed up an arrangement, rather like that of an electric bell, whereby the limbs in contracting broke contact and in relaxing restored it, and so he managed to keep the frog in continuous rhythmical movement. Whereas Galvani had been rightly convinced by his earlier observations that the movement in the specimens represented a reaction to an electric stimulus from outside, he now changed his mind. In the very moment of his really significant discovery he succumbed to the error that he had to do with an effect of animal electricity located somewhere in the dead creature itself, perhaps in the fashion of what had been observed in the electric fishes. He decided that the metal attachment served merely to set in motion the electricity within the animal. |
|