MUSCLES, NERVES, AND ELECTRICAL ORGANS. 223 



electromotive phenomena of muscle and nerve expressed in that work. 

 The generalisation by which I concluded from the positive polarisation 

 of muscles that there was also polarisation of the intrapolar nerve- 

 tract, had perhaps something- of youthful rashness in it, but nature 

 proved me to be right when a few years later, I discovered in the 

 positive after-current of nerves an indication of the prevalence of 

 positive polarisation during the primary current. In so far as no 

 other reasonable explanation of positive polarisation could be given, 

 excepting that which regards it as due to the directing of already 

 existing forces, the evidence obtained of this polarisation is at the 

 same time serviceable in another way. In my eyes it afforded and 

 will continue to afford proof of the presence of electromotive forces 

 in uninjured nerves, a proof which, in the absence of a natural 

 transverse section of a nerve, was otherwise lacking. The evidence 

 of the existence of such forces in muscle obtained by carefully 

 testing the natural transverse section of muscle, is also strengthened 

 by it. In the same way I hoped to show the electromotive forces 

 of muscles at rest in living men, the observation of which is ren- 

 dered impossible by cutaneous currents, by parelectronomy, and by 

 derivation through the skin. I had this in my mind in the ex- 

 periments described in Sections n and 13, and in this sense the 

 secondary electromotive phenomena should form the conclusion of 

 the eighth chapter of the ' Untersuchungen ' which treats ' of the 

 muscle-current and its motor phenomena in living uninjured 

 animals V 



Furthermore, as I now saw the possibility of explaining the 

 electromotive forces of the shock in electrical organs by the physio- 

 logical polarisation of molecules (Tragern) ; as I was fortunate 

 enough here also to prove the existence of positive polarisation on 

 the largest scale and in undoubted connection with the shock of 

 the organ ; lastly, as Delle Chiaie's and Babuchin's statement 

 regarding the preformation of electrical elements in the organs of 

 electrical fishes leaves no doubt of a pile-like strengthening 

 of the shock in the plate, therefore it need occasion no surprise 

 that I still believe myself on the right road, and that for the 

 present 1 contemplate with calmness the polemic which Hermann 

 has directed against my views for sixteen years, and which has 

 hitherto been more fruitful in technical expressions than in new 

 facts. Repeatedly, and from two quite different hypothetical bases, 



1 Loc. cit., vol. i. p. 240; vol. ii. part i. p. 331 ; part ii. pp. J, 377. 



