FIG. 261. VOLTA. 



CHAPTER XX. 



PHYSICS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ELECTRICITY. 



IF the facts relating to electricity which had been discovered by the 

 middle of the eighteenth century be remembered, it will be seen 

 that nothing was more natural than that men's minds should be oc- 

 cupied in the following period by the idea that there existed some 

 mysterious connection between electricity and the principle of life. 

 The known effects of the Leyden jar made the nature of the action of 

 electricity on the animal economy a subject of study for the physio- 

 logist. At the end of the eighteenth century the chair of anatomy at the 

 University of Bologna was occupied by a certain ALOYSIUS GALVANI 

 (1737 1798), who was not only an adept in his professed science, but 

 a skilful experimentalist in chemistry and physics. He was occupied 

 at the period of which we are speaking in experiments on the effects 

 of electricity on the organs of animals. In 1780 Galvani was one day 



543 



