198 life's beginning on the earth 



to this effectiveness. By bringing the head closer to the 

 tail, the fish diminishes the distance between the poles and 

 makes the discharge correspondingly stronger. It has been 

 reported that a full-grown electric eel can knock down a 

 horse which happens to step on it. 



This marvelous living battery with all its baffling actions 

 is a real enigma. It contains not only a high-voltage bat- 

 tery, but also a device which connects this battery with the 

 water on the outside, for discharge. The nerve impulses 

 from the brain of the fish make this connection automati- 

 cally for a fraction of a second only. At rapidly succeeding 

 intervals, the battery is turned off and on, many times a 

 minute. These intermittent discharges of current are more 

 dangerous to the victims than a continuous current. 



If we attempted to make such a powerful and rapid action 

 with a machine we should have to set up a very complicated 

 device. We should need an automatic intermittent con- 

 tact, and a battery weighing probably 100 times as much 

 as the whole fish. Metal would be everywhere in this 

 machinery: in the battery plates, in the wiring system. 

 The fish, however, dispenses deadly electric shocks without 

 any machinery, without the slightest metallic particle, his 

 battery consisting entirely of plates of fat of some kino!, in 

 place of the metal. Is it possible to make a battery con- 

 taining fat-layers with some aqueous solution between 

 them, instead of metal plates in a watery solution? 



The problem has been investigated by this writer. After 

 much experimentation, he found out how to set up an arti- 

 ficial battery system containing fat layers similar to those 

 in the electric fish. It is a general rule that any battery 

 must be composed of plates of different composition in order 

 to produce an electric current, and this rule applies also to 

 an artificial fat battery. No electric charge or current 

 would be produced if the consecutive fat -layers in it were 

 identical. It is necessary to use differently composed fat- 



