CH. xxix. ANIMAL ELECTRICITY. 259 



Discovery of Animal Electricity by Galvani, and of 

 Chemical or Voltaic Electricity by Volta, 1789-1800. 



Only a few months before Franklin died a new fact had 

 been discovered about electricity, which would have given 

 the old man great delight if he could have lived to see the 

 results. This discovery was made by Galvani, Professor 

 of Anatomy at Bologna, or perhaps we ought to say by 

 Madame Galvani, for it was her observation which first led 

 her husband to study the subject. 



Aloysius Galvani was born at Bologna in 1737, and we 

 know little of his early life except that, instead of becoming 

 a monk as he first intended, he married a professor's 

 daughter, and became the Lecturer on Anatomy in the 

 University of Bologna. He had in his house an electrical 

 machine which he used for experiments, and one day in 

 1789, as Madame Galvani was skinning frogs for a soup, one 

 of Galvani's assistants was working the machine near her. 

 Just as the flow of electricity was going on rapidly, this 

 young man happened to touch a nerve of the leg of a dead 

 frog with a dissecting knife, and to his great surprise the leg 

 began to move and struggle as if it were alive. Madame 

 Galvani was so much struck by this that she told her hus- 

 band of it directly he returned, and he repeated the experi- 

 ment many times, and found that whenever the flow of 

 electricity from the machine was brought near the nerve of 

 the frog's leg it produced convulsions. He next tried 

 whether lightning brought down upon the nerves of the leg 

 would have the same effect, and the experiment succeeded 

 perfectly. 



Meanwhile another accident showed him that the con- 

 vulsions could be produced without either lightning or an 

 electrical machine. He had prepared the hind legs of 



