Page:Hamel Telegraph history England 1859.pdf/16

 “Bulletin de la Société médicale d’émulation,” a notice of the telegraph, in which he speaks with much detail of the analogy which the many wires of the galvano-electric cord seemed to present with the single fibres of a nervous trunk, to which analogy Soemmerring had pointed in the Mémoire, prepared for Larrey, as well as in his original description of the telegraph printed in the “Denkschriften” of the Academy of Munich, for 1809 and 1810. Larrey’s said article appeared again, nearly twenty years later (in November, 1829), in his “Clinique chirurgicale.”

In both these publications of Baron Larrey’s the telegraph is placed in the midst of pathological and surgical subjects, where one would hardly look for an invention for telegraphic purposes.

On the 9th of December, 1809, Ludwig Karl, then Crown Prince of Bavaria—who in 1825 became King, and abdicated in 1848—honoured Soemmerring with a visit. Unfortunately the new telegraph, which was to replace the original one taken by Larrey to Paris, was not yet quite ready to perform experiments with.

At the time when Soemmerring became a member of the Academy of Sciences at Munich, in 1805, there was attached to the Russian mission in that capital the Baron