VOL. LXXXIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 289 



nomena, which would appear, from both Galvani's experiments and mine, to 

 belong to a true spontaneous animal electricity, and which are not so ; but are 

 really the effects of a very weak artificial electricity. As to the motion of the 

 muscles, my experiments, varied in all possible ways, show that the motion of 

 the electric fluid, excited in the organs, does not act immediately on the mus- 

 cles ; that it only excites the nerves, and that these, put in action, excite in 

 their turn the muscles. Whereas Galvani supposes in all cases, that the trans- 

 fusion of the electric fluid, produced either by artificial electricity, or by natural 

 animal electricity, ought to act from the nerves to the muscles, or vice versa. 

 But these ideas are restrained within too narrow limits. For, in varying the 

 experiments in different ways, I have found that neither of these conditions, viz. 

 the laying bare and isolating the nerves, and at the same time touching these and 

 the muscles, to procure the pretended discharge, is absolutely necessary. It is 

 sufficient, for example, when we have laid bare the sciatic nerve of a dog, or a 

 lamb, &c. to cause an electric current to pass from one part of this nerve to 

 another, even next to it, leaving all the rest untouched and free, as well as the 

 whole leg ; it is sufficient, I say, for this to see excited in this leg the strongest 

 convulsions and motions ; and this, whether we employ an artificial electricity, 

 or put in motion the electric fluid in the nerve itself. 



Mr. Volta next relates several experiments of his own, to prove these posi- 

 tions, and then adds, these last preparations lead to those of Galvani ; which 

 indeed prove that it is better to lay bare the nerves, and still more to detach them 

 round about ; but not that this is a necessary condition, since he had obtained 

 the same convulsions and motions of the members by simply laying bare the nms- 

 cles, and leaving all the nerves enveloped and hid under them in the natural 

 state. 



After these essays on reptiles, birds, and small quadrupeds, I proceeded, says 

 Mr. Volta, to other and larger animals, rabbits, dogs, lambs, beeves ; and not 

 only produced the same effects by all the foregoing methods, but obtained some 

 more remarkable and durable, as the vital heat subsists longer in these large ani- 

 mals and their members. For it must be remarked, that though in most cold- 

 blooded animals, and particularly in frogs, vitality subsists in the amputated 

 members many hours, this vitality, which renders them so sensible to the 

 weakest electric irritation, lasts only some minutes in the severed members of 

 warm-blooded animals, and commonly disappears before all that animal heat is 

 dissipated. 



Mr. V. having had such success in his experiments on large and small ani- 

 mals of all kinds, sometimes living and entire, sometimes skinned, decapitated, 

 and dissected in different ways, also in each of their large members cut off, and 

 alrnost always without Galvani's preparation of laying bare the nerves ; he then 



VOL. XVII. P p 



