PHYSIOLOGY 



She was preparing some frogs' legs for dinner, 



and had got them hung up in a row. Her husband 



was working a frictional electricity machine in 



the neighbourhood in the same room and she 



noticed and called her husband's attention to the 



fact that these apparently dead frogs' legs began 



to twitch. Galvani was so struck with this singular 



occurrence that he wanted to try the effect of 



atmospheric electricity upon the frogs' legs, and, 



hoping for a thunderstorm, he went up on to the 



roof and hung up his row of frogs' legs on copper 



hooks, attached to a railing made of iron. Instead 



of a thunderstorm there came a gentle breeze, 



and he noticed that when the toes of the frogs 



were blown against the iron railings they again 



began to twitch ; i.e., he discovered that, by the 



contact of dissimilar metals, he had made what was 



the first electric battery, and, in his contemporary 



Volta's hands, the voltaic cell was constructed, 



and that was the progenitor of our modern batteries 



and of the great branch of electrical science whose 



name, ' galvanism,' is an indication of its origin. 



As Helmholtz said, writing nearly a hundred years 



later, if this little experiment with the frogs' legs 



and the dissimilar metals had been disregarded as 



being of no use to anyone, what would not the 



world have lost, for, in a comparatively short time 



after the discovery, electric messages by telegraphic 



wires were travelling with the speed of lightning 



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