528 LIVING TORPEDOS IN BERLIN. 



connective tissue to which this property belongs, but the electrical 

 plates themselves. It cannot depend upon Boll's striations, because 

 besides the difficulty of understanding- how this could be the case, 

 the malapterurus plates are striated on both surfaces \ Since death 

 and boiling heat put an end to irreciprocity, it seems as if it must 

 be connected in some way with the function of the plates. In the 

 first communication (p. 453) I endeavoured to explain the worse 

 heterodromous conduction, by supposing that the heterodromous 

 current is almost or quite incapable of rotating the hypothetical 

 electromotive molecules in such a way, that its positive pole may 

 face the negative surface, which in the torpedo is the ventral 

 surface of the organ. At first sight, it seems in accordance with 

 this supposition, that the resistances become the same in both 

 directions in the dead organ, in which the hypothetical molecules 

 have ceased to act. But the difficulty arises that they decrease 

 at the same time, so that they become less than the smaller of 

 them was during life. If the electromotive molecules, by virtue of 

 the different electro-chemical nature of their poles, were considered 

 in electrolytic conduction as molecules made up of electro-positive 

 and electro-negative substances according to Grotthuss' theory, then 

 we should expect, on the contrary, that the dead organ would conduct 

 worse in both directions, than the living organ in the hetero- 

 dromous direction. It is, however, no way out of the difficulty to 

 say that the organ by itself, without the aid afforded by the electro- 

 motive molecules, conducts as badly as it does when traversed by 

 heterodromous currents during life, and that owing to alteration in 

 the dead body, formation of acid, etc., it conducts better than when 

 traversed by homodromous currents during life. 



14. Teleology of irreciprocal conduction in the electrical 



organ. 



We have been frequently reminded in the course of these studies, 

 of the difficulty which the older physicists and physiologists, from 

 Volta and Nicholson to Faraday and Valentin, found in explaining 

 the actions of electrical fish, without insulating septa ; these they 

 supposed placed laterally about the organs, or that they came 

 into existence at the moment of the shock. The first fruit of my 

 labours in this department was the removal of this error, more than 



1 Untersuchungen, &c., pp. 291, 391, 392. 



