xxviii INTRODUCTORY 



insulation of their connections. Temperament may have 

 befriended me, but the germ of carefulness was implanted 

 by Mr. Finlay, and I am grateful to him for it. 



The article from which I have quoted attracted the 

 notice of Dr. Stone of St. Thomas's, a correspondence 

 resulted, and, eventually, I collaborated, unofficially, with 

 him in the preparation of his Lumleian lecture of the year, 

 the subject being, " The Human Body Considered as an 

 Electrolyte." 



At that time I am afraid we, neither of us, knew very 

 much about it, but although working in different sections 

 of the field of scientific investigation, we had both arrived 

 at one conclusion, viz., that local pyrexia interfered with 

 local insulation resistance. 



The importance of this discovery can scarcely be over- 

 estimated, but we did not realise it ; he, not before his 

 death, which occurred not long after, I, not for many years, 

 because other occupations and duties intervened and 

 research work had to be relegated for the nonce to the 

 background. 



It was some time about the year 1900 that I fitted up 

 a laboratory and seriously took up my task anew. And 

 then a curious thing happened. We had a juvenile party, 

 and some of the young people, inspired, perhaps, by a 

 magazine article or fairy-tale, asked me if apples were 

 electrical, if one could eat things which would make one 

 luminous, and so forth. I replied, " Come and see." 

 We went into the testing-room, and having procured some 

 apples and oranges and lemons, I connected two steel 

 darning-needles by two lengths of flexible wire to the 

 terminals of the galvanometer and, of course, obtained 

 deflections. These experiments were regarded by me, at 



