82 HISTORY OF GALVANISM. 



when a spark was taken from the machine. If 

 Galvani had been as good a physicist as he was 

 an anatomist, he would probably have seen that 

 the movements so occasioned, proved only that the 

 muscles or nerves, or the two together, formed a 

 very sensitive indicator of electrical action. It 

 was when he produced such motions by contact of 

 metals alone, that he obtained an important and 

 fundamental fact in science. 



The analysis of this fact into its real and essen- 

 tial conditions was the work of Alexander Volta, 

 another Italian professor. Volta, indeed, possessed 

 that knowledge of the subject of electricity which 

 made a hint like that of Galvani the basis of a new 

 science. Galvani appears never to have acquired 

 much general knowledge of electricity: Volta, on 

 the other hand, had laboured at this branch of 

 knowledge from the age of eighteen, through a 

 period of nearly thirty years ; and had invented an 

 electrophorus and an electrical condenser, which 

 showed great experimental skill. When he turned 

 his attention to the experiments made by Galvani, 

 he observed that the author of them had been far 

 more surprized than he needed to be, at those re- 

 sults in which an electrical spark was produced; 

 and that it was only in the cases in which no such 

 apparatus was employed, that the observations 

 could justly be considered as indicating a new law, 

 or a new kind of electricity 2 . He soon satisfied 

 8 Phil. Trans. 1793, p. 21. 



