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 



