MODERN ASPECTS OF THE LIFE-QUESTION. 753 



Matteucci was the first to observe and to call attention to the 

 remarkable similarity, in structure and in the mechanism of operation, 

 between striated muscular fiber and the electric organ of certain fishes. 

 Recently, Marey has repeated and extended his observations. In 

 structure, the electric organ is made up, like the muscle, of columnar 

 masses each separable transversely into vesicular sections. In a tor- 

 pedo weighing seventy-three pounds, there were 1,182 of these col- 

 umns, with 150 sections, on an average, in each. In the muscles 

 which bend the forearm, there are 798,000 fibrillte. As 'to the mech- 

 anism, alike in muscle and in electric organ, an electric current stimu- 

 lates action on opening and on closing the circuit, but not when it is 

 flowing ; the same phenomena take place in both with the direct and 

 with the inverse current ; both are reflex ; stimulation of the electric 

 nerve produces discharge, as that of the motor nerve causes muscular 

 shock ; an entire paralysis follows nerve-section ; curare paralyzes 

 both ; and tetanus results in both from rapid currents or from strych- 

 nine. 



Still more striking analogies are furnished by the investigation of 

 the susurrus or muscular sound, first noticed in 1809 by Wollaston. 

 This sound is produced by all muscles when in the state of contraction, 

 the pitch of the note being not far from thirty vibrations per second. 

 It is evidently only the intermittent discharge of the muscular fiber. 

 A single excitation produces a muscular shock. As this production 

 requires from eight to ten hundredths of a second, it is evident that, if 

 another stimulus be applied before the first has disappeared, the two 

 will coalesce ; and when twenty per second reach the muscle it becomes 

 permanently contracted or tetanized. By means of a very sensitive 

 myograph, Marey has found that in voluntary contraction the motor 

 nerves are the seats of successive acts, each of which produces an ex- 

 citation of the muscle. In 1877 Marey examined similarly the dis- 

 charge of the torpedo, and found a most complete correspondence be- 

 tween it and muscular contraction. Since electric tension disappears 

 from a muscle during contraction, is not the evidence conclusive that 

 muscular contraction, like the discharge of the electric organ of the 

 torpedo, is an electrical phenomenon ? 



Granting electric discharge to be the cause of muscle-contraction, 

 what is its origin ? That it is not carried to the muscle by the nerves 

 follows from the fact that a muscle will still contract when deprived 

 of all its nerve-fibers. It must therefore be generated within the mus- 

 cle itself. To reach a solution of the problem we must obviously fol- 

 low the analogies of its production elsewhere. 



Perhaps no single question in physics has been more keenly dis- 

 cussed than this one of the origin of electric charge. The memorable 

 conflict between Galvani and Volta, between animal electricity and 

 the electricity of metallic contact, succeeded by the even more tri- 

 umphant overthrow of the latter and the establishment ultimately by 

 TOL. xvn. 4.3 



