stance. The
weight of so much metal squeezed the wet cloth dry, and this led to
various contrivances for keeping it wet, resulting at last in the
invention of the familiar "trough-battery," now employed in all
telegraph offices and manufactories of electro-anything. Instead of
Galvani's frog or Volta's wet rag, the conductor is a solution of
sulphuric acid, which Volta himself suggested and employed. The negative
electricity is conveyed to the earth by a wire, and the positive is
conducted from pair to pair, increasing as it goes, until, if the
battery is large enough, it may have the force to send a message round
the world. And the current is continuous. The galvanic battery is an
electrical machine that goes without turning a handle. By the galvanic
battery, electricity is made subservient to man. Among other things, it
sends his messages, faces his type with copper, silvers his coffee-pot,
and coats the inside of his baby's silver mug with shining gold.

The old methods of covering metals with a plating of silver were so
difficult and laborious, that durable ware could never have been
produced by them except at an expense which would have defeated the
object. In those slow and costly ways plated articles were made as late
as the year 1840; and thus they might be made at the present moment, if
Signora Galvani had been looking the other way when the student touched
the frog with his knife. More than fifty years elapsed before that
chance discovery was made available in the art we are considering. For
many years the discoveries of Galvani and Volta did not appear to add
much to the resources of man, though they excited his "special wonder,"
Elderly readers can perhaps remember the appalling accounts that used to
be published, forty years ago or more, of the galvanizing of criminals
after execution. In 1811, at Glasgow, a noted chemist tried the effect
of a voltaic "pile" of two hundred and seventy pairs of plates upon the
body of a murderer. As the various parts of the nervous system were
subjected to the current, the most startling results followed. The whole
body shuddered as with cold; one of the legs nearly kicked an attendant
over; the chest heaved, and the lungs inhaled and exhaled. At one time,
when all the power of the instrument was exerted, we are told that
"every muscle of the countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful
action. Rage, horror, despair and anguish, and ghastly smiles, united
their hideous