Page:Scientific Memoirs, Vol. 2 (1841).djvu/413



The Galvanic Circuit investigated Mathematically. By Dr. Author:Georg Simon Ohm.

HEREWITH present to the public a theory of galvanic electricity, as a special part of electrical science in general, and shall successively, as time, inclination, and means permit, arrange more such portions together into a whole, if this first essay shall in some degree repay the sacrifices it has cost me. The circumstances in which I have hitherto been placed, have not been adapted either to encourage me in the pursuit of novelties, or to enable me to become acquainted with works relating to the same department of literature throughout its whole extent. I have therefore chosen for my first attempt a portion in which I have the least to apprehend competition. May the well-disposed reader receive the performance with the same love for the object as that with which it is sent forth. 2em

design of this Memoir is to deduce strictly from a few principles, obtained chiefly by experiment, the rationale of those electrical phænomena which are produced by the mutual contact of two or more bodies, and which have been termed Galvanic:—its aim is attained if by means of it the variety of facts be presented as unity to the mind. To begin with the most simple investigations, I have confined myself at the outset to those cases where the excited electricity propagates itself only in one dimension. They form, as it were, the scaffold to a greater structure, and contain precisely that portion, the more accurate knowledge of which may be gained from the elements of natural philosophy, and which, also, on account of its greater accessibility, may be given in a more strict form. To answer