526 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



add to the fatality. Visitations so severe and disastrous permanently 

 affect the inhabitants of earthquake regions. Their minds lose their 

 calm equipoise they become nervous, and the first considerable shock 

 6ends them to the street or cathedral for safety. 



Humboldt remarks that, when " we feel the ground move beneath 

 us, our deceptive faith in the repose of Nature vanishes, and we feel 

 ourselves transferred into a realm of unknown and destructive forces. 

 Every sound, the faintest motion of the air, arrests attention. To man, 

 the earthquake conveys the idea of unlimited danger." And Von 

 Tschudi adds his testimony, that " no familiarity with earthquakes can 

 blunt this feeling of insecurity. The traveller from the north of 

 Europe waits with impatience to feel the movement of the earth, and 

 with his own ear to listen to the subterranean sounds, but, soon as his 

 wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is prompted to seek safety 

 in flight." Thus it is that physical phenomena aid in moulding the 

 mental and moral character of a people. The earthquake records it- 

 self, not only on the inorganic world, but in man's spiritual nature. 



** 



ELECTEICITT AND LIFE. 



By FEENAND PAPILLON. 



TRANSLATED BY A. R. MACDONOUGH, ESQ. 



GALVANI discovered, in 1794, that the muscles of animals ex- 

 perience contractions in contact with certain metals. In his 

 view, this contact merely calls out the discharge of a fluid inherent in 

 the animals themselves. The fact was not to be contested, but its ex- 

 planation was. Lively discussions in the schools of physiology fol- 

 lowed fortunately, with a clear understanding that the difficulty could 

 only be determined by experiments. A vast number were made, the 

 name of Volta being connected with the most remarkable of them. 

 Alexander Volta maintained, in opposition to Galvani, that the elec- 

 tricity which produces contractions in the muscles, far from originating 

 in those organs, is introduced by the metals used in the process. In 

 proof of this he constructed, in 1800, the pile that bears his name, and 

 which is an arrangement in which the connection of two different met- 

 als becomes an abundant source of the electric fluid. Galvani and 

 Volta were two men of distinguished genius, who thoroughly under- 

 stood physics and physiology, and advanced nothing heedlessly. Their 

 discoveries were the point of departure for one of the most admirable 

 movements in all the history of science, a movement which is still 

 most active, and is the more remarkable because it resulted but yester- 

 day, as it were, in the complete demonstration that Galvani and Volta 

 were both in the right. Science to-day proves that there is an elec- 



