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through my head that struck me down without hurting me. And I 
_ had seen a young woman that was about to be electrified through 
the feet (for some indisposition) receive a greater charge through 
the head by inadvertently stooping forward to look at the placing 
of her feet, till her forehead (as she was very tall) came too near 
my prime conductor: She dropt, but instantly got up again com- 
plaining of nothing. A person so struck sinks down doubled or 
folded together as it were, the joints losing their strength and stiff- 
ness at once, so that he drops on the spot where he stood, instantly, 
and there is no previous staggering, nor does he ever fall length- 
wise. Too great a charge might indeed kill a man, but I have not 
yet seen any hurt done by it. It would certainly, as you observe, 
be the easiest of all deaths.’’ 
If the condition of electrostatic science when the American Phil- 
osophical Society was founded was as primitive as we have above 
pointed out, that of the other departments of electricity was far 
more so. Galvani had not observed the twitching of the frog’s 
legs as, suspended by a copper wire, they swung to and fro against 
the iron railing of his laboratory baleony. Volta had not made 
his important discovery that the contact of two metals developed 
electrification ; and hence had not at this time constructed his cele- 
brated pile. True, metals had been fused by the discharge of the 
electric battery, needles had been magnetized by it, and animals 
had been shocked and even killed by it, as in the experiments made 
by Franklin and others soon after 1743. But now various other 
modes of electrification were to be discovered and coérdinated and 
the identity of the result, by whatsoever means obtained, was to be 
experimentally established. 
Among the members of this Society whose names appear promi- 
nent as investigators in these new fields we should mention Robert 
Hare, Joseph Henry, Joseph Saxton, David Rittenhouse and Alex- 
ander Dallas Bache. 
Robert Hare was elected a member of the American Philosophi- 
cal Society in 1803. In 1821 he published an important paper 
“©On Some New Modifications of Galvanic Apparatus.’’ * In this 
paper he states that he had observed that, while the maximum effect 
of a single galvanic pair was reached as soon as the plates were 
immersed in the liquid, a series of troughs which had to be succes- 
* Amer. Jour. Science and Arts, iii, 105, 1821. 
