fit Additional Notes. 



the best conductors, and next to these water, and all other moist 

 bodies; but it was lately discovered, that dry charcoal, recently burnt, 

 was a more perfect conductor than metals; and it appears from the 

 experiments discovered by Galvani, which have thence the name 

 of Galvanism, that animal flesh, and particularly perhaps the nerves 

 of animals, both which are composed of much carbon and water, are 

 the most perfect conductors yet discovered; that is, that they give 

 the least resistance to the junction of the spontaneous electric atmo- 

 spheres, which exist rovmd metallic bodies, and which differ very little 

 in respect to the proportions of their vitreous and resinous ingre- 

 dients. 



Thus also, though where the accumulated electricities are dense, 

 as in charging a coated glass-jar, the glass, which intervenes, may be 

 of considerable thickness, and may still become charged by the 

 stronger attraction of the secondary electric ethers; but where the 

 spontaneous adhesive electric atmospheres are employed to charge 

 plates of air, as in the Galvanic pile, or probably to charge thin animal 

 membranes or cuticles, as perhaps in the shock given by the torpedo 

 or gymnotus, it seems necessary that the intervening nonconducting 

 plate must be extremely thin, that it may become charged by the 

 weaker attraction of these small quantities or difference of the spon- 

 taneous electric atmospheres; and in this circumstance only, I sup- 

 pose, the shocks from the Galvanic pile, and from the torpedo and 

 gymnotus, differ from those of the coated jar. 



3. When atmospheres of electricity, which do not differ much in 

 the quantity or proportion of their vitreous and resinous ethers, ap- 

 proach each other, they are not easily or rapidly united; but the pre- 

 dominant vitreous or resinous ether of one of them repels the similar 

 ether of the opposed atmosphere, and attracts the contrary kind of 

 ether. 



The slowness or difficulty with which atmospheres, which differ 

 but little in kind or in density, unite with each other, appears not 

 only from the experiment of Mr. Canton above related, but also from 

 the repeated smaller shocks, which may be taken from a charged 

 coated jar after the first or principal discharge, if the conducting 

 jnedium has not been quickly removed, as is also mentioned above. 



