Frogs and their Contributions to Science. 131 



until Volta, in 1800, extended it to the production of 

 electrical effects by contact of different metals, and con- 

 ceived the grand idea of what is known as Volta' s pile. 

 From this, progress in the knowledge and applications of 

 electricity was wonderfully increased, until now we can- 

 not estimate its influence. In chemistry, in the arts, in 

 the spread of printed leaves, and in the transmission of 

 thought regardless of intervening space, it has become the 

 great agent of the world's civilization. In this very build- 

 ing, where this last and crowning application of the electric 

 current to telegraphic purposes was first conceived and 

 actually put in practice, is it not meet that we should link 

 the glory of the achievement with the memory of the mar- 

 tyred frogs that gave the primitive idea birth ? Could they 

 speak from beneath the scientific altars upon which they 

 were so freely sacrificed, might not each one exultingly 

 croak at the recital of the fact we have stated 



Quorum pars minima fui? 



It is, however, in the great field of physiological re- 

 searches, and in the solution of. questions relative to man's 

 organic being, that we find the frog most intimately and 

 happily associated. 



Probably one of the most important discoveries in physi- 

 ology of the present century is that of Marshall Hall 

 published in 1826, of the true spinal, or, as now called 

 diastaltic system, or system of reflex action. It is that 

 system of incident and reflex nerves connected with the 

 spinal axis as a centre, and which presides over all the . 

 functions of the body, and on which depends the preserva- 

 tion of the individual and the continuance of the species. 

 We breathe, we swallow, we wink the eye, we sneeze, we 

 vomit, we excrete, emit, extrude, and do a hundred 

 things beside by virtue of the operation of this law. It is 

 a kind of motion or action, the first to be exhibited in the 



