-as every boy in a telegraph office now perceives. He was
merely the _wet_ in the small galvanic battery. Professor Galvani,
however, exulting in his discovery, leaped to the conclusion that this
electricity was not the same as that produced by friction. He thought he
had discovered the long-sought something by which the muscles move
obedient to the will. "All creatures," he wrote, "have an electricity
inherent in their economy, which resides specially in the nerves, and is
by the nerves communicated to the whole body. It is secreted by the
brain. The interior substance of the nerves is endowed with a
conducting power for this electricity, and facilitates its movement and
its passage from one part of the nervous system to another; while the
oily coating of these organs hinders the dissipation of the fluid, and
permits its accumulation." He also thought that the muscles were the
Leyden jars of the animal system, in which the electricity generated by
the brain and conducted by the nerves was hoarded up for use. When a man
was tired, he had merely used his electricity too fast; when he was
fresh, his Leyden jars were all full.

The publication of these experiments in 1791, accompanied by Galvani's
theory of animal electricity, produced a sensation in scientific circles
only inferior to that caused by Franklin's demonstration of the identity
of lightning with electricity, thirty years before. The murder of
innocent frogs extended from the marshes of Bologna to the swamps of all
Christendom. "Wherever," says a writer of the time, "frogs were to be
found and two different metals could be procured, every one was anxious
to see the mangled limbs of frogs brought to life in this wonderful
way." Or, as Lamb says, in the dissertation upon Roast Pig: "The thing
took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every
direction." At first the facts and the theory of Galvani were equally
accepted; and a grateful world insisted upon styling the new science, as
it was deemed, "Galvanism." Thus a word was added to all the languages,
which has been found useful in its literal sense, and forcible in its
figurative. Whatever we may think of Galvani's philosophy, we cannot
deny that he immortalized his name. He died a few years after, fully
satisfied with his theory, but having no suspicion of the many, the
peculiar, the marvellous results that were to flow from the chance
discovery of the fact, that a moist frog placed between two