In this memoir, Prof. Matteucci, after recapitulating the results of his previous researches on electro-physiology, published in the Philosophical Transactions, proceeds to the relation of new experiments. He first shows that nervous filaments made to conduct an electric current in a liquid are not capable, like metallic wires, of acting as electroids, and giving rise to electro-chemical decomposition. The solution employed was that of iodide of potassium; the nerves, two large ones taken from a living animal, each of which was separately attached to the metallic extremities of a pile of fifteen couples. No trace of decomposition followed; and he concludes from hence, that the conductihility of nervous matter is due to the liquid part of the matter itself. He then gives further experiments on the relative conductibility of muscles and nerves, with a view to ascertain whether, when a current was impelled through a mass of muscle, any part of the current might have passed through the nervous filaments spread through that muscle. For this purpose he inserted the nerve of a galvanoscopic frog into a hole made in a piece of dead muscle, through which he then passed a very powerful current: no contraction followed in the galvanoscopic frog. When muscles still retaining their irritability were substituted for the dead muscle, induced contractions occurred in the galvanoscopic frog during the passage of the current. He concludes that when the poles of a pile of twenty-five or thirty elements are applied to the surface of the muscles of a living animal, the phenomena produced by the passage of the current must depend either on the direct action of the current on the muscular fibre, or on the indirect action or influence of the electric current transmitted by the muscular fibre to its own nervous filaments, or rather to the nervous force existing in those filaments.
XXXIV. Account of an experiment in which chemical decomposition has been effected by the induced magneto-electric current
