in many cases of sudden emotion or injury, sensitive persons are singularly influenced beyond all doubt by particular electric states of the atmosphere, and some disorders are clearly connected with certain changes in the electricity.

Mr. Hinton looks upon Coleridge as the great apostle of this creed. "This idea, derived it is said originally from Schelling, is, that physical life is a process or mode of operation which we recognize under other names, as magnetism, electricity, or chemical affinity." Oken had no misgivings about the matter in a general sense at any rate; "organism," he says, "is galvanism residing in a thoroughly homogeneous mass. A galvanic pile pounded into atoms must become alive"! But as Oken says he wrote in a kind of inspiration and gravely tells his readers that quartz, felspar, and mica, the three constituents of granite, were the hail-drops of heavy showers of stone that fell into the original ocean and turned to rocks at the bottom"! I think we may hesitate about accepting his doctrines without examining them.

But I believe that with a few exceptions the best physiologists of the present day are agreed that the vital power is not electricity. Müller says, "we are by no means justified in regarding it as identical with the known imponderable matters or general physical forces, caloric, light, and electricity, a comparison which is refuted by any close examination." Every form of electricity can be evoked or generated by art; it can be poured into metals, kept in them, conducted off or allowed to ooze out; unlike the magnetic fluids which

*Life in Nature, p. 140.

never quit the substance that contains them under any circumstances whatever, it has a constant tendency to escape. None of this holds good of the vital power, and I feel compelled to say that, alluring as the idea has been made to appear, I can see no proof that it is identical with electricity, or that this powerful agent can evoke any form of life or effect any changes of so high a character as the vital power. It is highly necessary here not to confound two very different things. The blood and muscles may be full of electricity, every secretion may, as Wollaston thought, be the result of an electrical action, but this property of electricity they only share with all moist saline substances; it has nothing to do with the great controlling power within the frame.

But this much I can see, and everything seems to point to the conclusion, that it is possible there may be the same relation between electricity and the vital power as between electricity and magnetism, or between heat and motion; that is under certain circumstances the one becomes the other. The frame is so charged with . weak electricity,* or with some force capable, as the reader will presently see, of being directly affected by electricity, that possibly every drop of serum may contain a certain portion, and the contact of two atoms highly charged with this force, one secreted by the male and one by the female, may be productive of the same

* "A simple but sudden and forcible contraction, by will, of the muscle of the forearm, evolves a current of electricity capable of passing through two or three miles of a helix coil.”—Essays on Scientific and other Subjects, by Sir Henry Holland. I should be sorry to throw any doubt on a statement by this accomplished physician, but I really almost think there must have been some mistake here.

sort of change as ensues when the balance of electricity is restored by a thunderstorm, and result in the production of an atom filled with the vital power, limited in its nature and force by the nature of the parents which produce it; as distinct in properties from the two atoms which formed it as an atom of calomel is from one of chlorine or mercury, but unlike the chemical atom incapable of resolution into its primary constituents.

Dr. Radcliffe, who has investigated this subject in a very different spirit from Oken and Coleridge, in his lectures recently delivered before the College of Physicians stated as the results of several carefully performed experiments, that when the fibres of a muscle or a nerve of motion are in a state of inaction, they are with certain exceptions in a condition of electric antagonism, their sides presenting signs of positive electricity, their ends of negative electricity; under certain circumstances these conditions are reversed, the sides becoming negative and the ends positive; if two points of one of these structures in a dissimilar state of tension are included in the circuit of a galvanic apparatus, they give unmistakable signs of a current of electricity.

Now when a person dies, and that stiffening sets in which only relaxes with the dissolution of the frame into its primary elements, this natural electricity is altogether absent. When a living muscle is put in motion, or when a motor nerve is thrown into a state of action, then also this natural electricity is absent. But what ensues? Why, that the state of action in a muscle or motor nerve is accompanied by an instantaneous development of currents of electricity of high tension.

Again, a most important statement made by Dr. Rad

cliffe is that continuous electric currents of low electric tension, instead of possessing that mighty restorative power which has been so often expected from them, and the utter absence of which has in the long run disgusted most men with electricity as a curative agent, seem to have a direct paralyzing influence upon that part of a motor nerve which is exposed to their influence. "There is reason," Dr. Radcliffe says, "to believe that a motor nerve or muscle cannot be thrown into a state of action by artificial electricity unless it retain a certain share of its natural electricity." It is almost impossible to overrate the importance of this passage, especially as the utmost confidence may be placed in the observations of this accomplished teacher. To my thinking it goes further than any other evidence to prove the conjecture I have already ventured to put forth about the relation between electricity and the vital power and yet their absolute non-identity. For while we see by the workings of an electric shock or a stroke of lightning, that electricity like any other stimulus will in the living body attract the vital power to the part it assails, we may learn by experiment that it cannot evoke vital actions in the muscles and nerves from which the vital power has been withdrawn by death. Again, the vital power influences and arranges the natural electricity of the constituent elements of the nerves and muscles; while it is employed in another organ this electricity is quiescent; directly the vital power flows towards them this electricity assumes a higher tension.

Dr. Radcliffe also tells us that "the natural electricity which is present in a living motor nerve or muscle during the state of inaction is almost or altogether

absent when the state of action is produced by means of artificial electricity."* Then here artificial electricity and the vital power produce the same result.

"When a muscle or motor nerve is thrown into a state of action by mechanical or chemical causes, or by heat or cold or light, there is reason to believe that this result is brought about through the instrumentality of the natural electricity of the nerve; for it is a fact that the state of action thus produced is marked by the disappearance of natural electricity and by the contemporaneous development of instantaneous electric currents of high tension."+

I now put before the reader some facts about magnetism which may be placed as parallels, and may be safely compared with some of the most marked among the results spoken of by Dr. Radcliffe.

A magnet then attracts non-magnetized iron, but when two magnets are brought together the north pole repels the north and the south pole repels the south. Faraday has shown that if iron be hung between the poles of an electro magnet it will be attracted by both poles, and all substances affected thus by the magnet are called magnetic. But if a bar of bismuth be hung in this way it is repelled by both poles, and takes a direction at right angles to that which the iron took. Bismuth is therefore called diamagnetic. All bodies are either magnetic or diamagnetic; the former are very few in number, the diamagnetic are vastly in the majority and include such substances as oil, sugar, starch, &c.

Now it is pretty clear that the comparison of either

*

Lancet, February 21, 1863. + Ibid. March 21, 1863.