Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/550

530 suffer, very curiously, a complete loss of hair; they are affected with paralysis, dumbness, deafness, amaurosis, or imbecility. In brief, the destructive attacks of atmospheric electricity touch all the functions of the nervous system.

The action of electric fishes may be likened to that of lightning, in being independent of our intention. The shocks of the gymnotus are particularly formidable. Alexander Humboldt relates that, having put both his feet on one of these fish, just taken from the water, he experienced so violent a shock that he felt pains in all his joints the rest of the day. These shocks throw the strongest animals down, and it is necessary to avoid rivers frequented by the gymnotus, because, in attempting to ford them, horses or mules might be killed by the discharges. To capture these fish the Indians drive wild horses into the water, stirring the eels up out of the mud by their trampling. The yellowish livid creatures press against the horses under their bellies, throw down the greater part and kill some of them, but, exhausted in their turn, they are then easily taken with the aid of small harpoons. The savages employ them to cure paralysis. Faraday compares the shock of a gymnotus, which he had an opportunity to study, to that of a strong battery of fifteen jars. A live eel out of water, when touched by the hand, communicates a shock strong in proportion to the extent of surface in contact, and the stroke is felt up to the shoulder, and followed by a very unpleasant numbness. It may be transmitted through twenty persons in a chain, the first one touching the back, and the last the belly of the eel. The fishermen discover the presence of an eel in their nets by experiencing a shock in throwing pailfuls of water on, to wash them. Water is a good conductor, and this fish kills or benumbs the animals it feeds on by delivering a discharge through the water.

Other sources of electricity are known to exist, besides thunder-storms and fishes. Friction-machines, batteries, and induction instruments, yield three kinds of currents that act on vital functions, sometimes in a similar way, but oftener with marked differences, which have only recently been clearly distinguished. The action of static electricity, and that of electricity of induction, more sudden and violent, is particularly marked by mechanical effects so striking that they have long distracted experimenters from examining with due attention those effects of another sort, produced by the galvanic current. Yet, the latter in reality affects the animal tissues in a deeper way, and its resulting phenomena deserve the liveliest interest from a theoretical point of view, as well as from their applied uses.

Dutrochet proved, by remarkable experiments, that, when a tube closed below by a membrane, and containing gum-water, is placed in a vessel containing pure water, the level of the gum-water rises little by little through the gradual introduction of pure water into the tube, while a certain quantity of the gum-water inside mingles with the