Note 21 — GALVANISM, (continued 3)

If the celebrated Bichat failed in his experiments on the human heart, as well as Aldini, it was, perhaps, owing to the same causes. The temperature was cold, and the interval between the time of execution and that of the experiment too long. “I was authorized,” says Bichat, “in the winter of the year 7, to make various trials on the bodies of unfortunate persons who had been guillotined. I had them at my disposal from thirty to forty minutes after execution. It was always impossible for me to produce the least motion by arming either the spinal marrow and the heart, or the latter organ and the nerves which it receives from the ganglions by the sympathetic, or from the brain by the par vagum.”