Misapprehending all, he was yet
unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience,
designate _dynamic_ electricity. He knew only of _animal_
electricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of
fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of
which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science
following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely
unimportant circumstances that led to _Galvanism_ and the
_Galvanic Battery_. Volta actually made this battery, then known as
the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The
reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They
have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have
descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science
of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding
demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in
poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have
now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the
paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the
ooze of the oceans from continent to continent.
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