The Electric Eel.
Not only in the frame of man, but in the bodies of the lower animals, are suggestions which ingenuity might well have acted upon in the past, or worthily pursue in the future. The science of electricity was born only with the nineteenth century because the gymnotus, or electric eel, had not been understandingly dissected. Its tissues disclose the very arrangement adopted by Volta in his first crude battery, namely, layers of susceptible material surrounded by slightly acid moisture. The characteristics of this eel have their homologies in the human body; in the muscles which bend the fore-arm, for example, are nearly a million delicate fibrils comparable in structure with the columnar organs of the gymnotus. These fibrils are so easily excited by electricity as to denote an essential similarity of build. Both the columnar layers of the eel and the fibrils of human muscle are affected in the same way by strychnine and by an allied substance, curare.