THE MUSCULAR CURRENT. 295 



experiment which appears to me to tend to establish the origin of the muscular cur- 

 rent according to these views. 



I prepared a great number of little cones, of about the size of half a frog's thigh, 

 cutting the very thin membrane of the caecum intestine into triangular pieces, and 

 folding them up, and gumming them together upon a little wooden form of a conical 

 shape. When these cones were dry, I prepared some fibrine by beating up some bul- 

 lock's blood, the bullock being killed at that moment. I immediately fitted the cones 

 with this fibrine steeped in blood, and composed a pile of twenty elements precisely 

 similar to the pile of half thighs. This pile did not exhibit the slightest signs of a 

 current in the most sensible of my galvanometers. Nor is it to be imagined that 

 there was any want of conductibility in the pile just described ; in fact, I added four 

 thighs of frogs prepared to the above twenty elements, and I obtained from this pile 

 a deflection but slightly differing from that which the frogs gave, acting alone. This 

 fact evidently proves that simple heterogeneity of the animal parts is not sufficient to 

 produce the muscular current; this heterogeneity should be such as exists in the 

 living muscle. 



