Eesearches on the Discharge of the Electric Organ. -29 



Assuming that the opening-stimulus, when very near to the 

 closing-one, lias not an appreciable effect on the discharge curve, its 

 influence Avas not considered in the first plan of the experiment. 

 But in examining the discharge cur\-e \Qvy minutelj^ as in the 

 preceding section, we found that it may be influenced more or less 

 by the opening-stimulus. If that be the case, in the experiment 

 for the relation between the duration of the current and the magni- 

 tude of the corresponding discharge, the maximum electromotive 

 force of a discharge may, for two reasons, diminish with the 

 decrease of the duration on account of the opening-stimulus: (1) 

 since the opening-stimulation would be due to the i-ecovery from 

 some kind of polarisation, the magnitude of its effect may l)e due 

 to the duration of the current that flowed before; and (2) when a 

 stimulus occurs imnn-diately after another it has a smaller effect, 

 being influenced by the preceding one — a phenomenon to ))e 

 discussed latei". Though I Ijclieve, after the result of the 

 analysis of No. o7 and of No. 40 in the preceding section, that 

 the decrease of the maximum electromotive force is due mainly 

 to the decrease of the duration of the current of the closing- 

 stimulus, it is very difficult to know how much the opening- 

 stimulus affects the discharge-height. Therefore without making 

 any assumption, we shall now regard the set of our stimuli to be 

 a single stimulus as a whole and deal with its relation to the 

 coiTesponding response. In the preceding section we see that a 

 discharge curve has three parameters to characterise its form, L c. 

 A, b^ and ;ro. Since, as we see, the changes of bo and .Vo with 

 respect to the stimulus are not conspicuous, we shall use ^1 as the 

 measure of the excitation. The area of the curve, which, if we 

 assume the theory of '"all or none," would correspond to the 

 number of the electric plates discharged, may be found by 

 integrating the formula of the discharge curve i. e. 



Area = I Ac~ ""^ -'ulx ^"^Ax,ß^^' (8) 







Indeed it was tried to use the area as the measure of the excitation 

 in the reduction of some of our experiments, but it did not give a 

 result much differing from that of A in general. Therefore leaving 



