258 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. PT. HL 



machine which he used for experiments, and one day in 

 1789, as Madame Gal van! was skinning frogs for a soup, 

 one of Galvani's assistants was working the machine near 

 her. Just as the flow of electricity was going on rapidly, 

 this young man happened to touch a nerve of the leg of a 

 dead frog with a dissecting knife, and to his great surprise 

 the leg began to move and struggle as if it were alive. 

 Madame Galvani was so much struck by this that she told 

 her husband of it directly he returned, and he repeated the 

 experiment many times, and found that whenever the flow 

 of electricity from the machine was brought near the nerve 

 of the frog's leg it produced convulsions. He next tried 

 whether lightning brought down upon the nerves of the leg 

 would have the same effect, and the experiment succeeded 

 perfectly. 



Meanwhile another accident showed him that the con- 

 vulsions could be produced without either lightning or an 

 electrical machine. He had prepared the hind legs of 

 several frogs and hung them by copper hooks upon an iron 

 balcony outside his house. As they hung there the wind 

 swayed them to and fro, so that the ends of the legs touched 

 the iron of the balcony ; and every time they did so he 

 noticed that the legs were convulsed just as. they had been 

 by the electrical machine and the lightning. But this time 

 he could not see that any electricity had come near them 

 from outside, so he supposed that there must be an electric 

 fluid in the leg itself, which p c fssed round every time the 

 two ends of the leg were joined by the metal. These dis- 

 coveries of Galvani soon became spoken of far and wide 

 under the name of galvanism, and the supposed fluid was 

 called the galvanic fluid. 



Among the celebrated men who were attracted by this 

 new discovery was Alessandro Volta, Professor of Natural 



