De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius.
Bologna: Instituti Scientiarum, 1791. First edition, incredibly rare offprint — preceding the journal publication and therefore the true first edition — of the work that inaugurated the modern epoch in electricity. Luigi Galvani’s De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius was published as one of the Opuscula of the De Bononiensi scientiarum et artium instituto atque academia (vol. 7, pp. 363–418), but the journal volume, though dated 1791, did not appear until the beginning of 1792. Galvani had a small number of offprints pulled in advance and distributed them to colleagues, notably to Alessandro Volta, whose copy (now at the Huntington Library) bears the inscription “Ex dono auctoris.” It was therefore this offprint, not the journal issue, that first communicated Galvani’s discoveries to the scientific world and set in train the controversy with Volta from which the electric battery, the continuous current, and the entire science of electrodynamics emerged. The four engraved plates by Galvani’s friend Jacopo Zambelli, graphically illustrating the dissections and electrical apparatus, are among the most famous of all illustrations in the history of biology — comparable, in their domain, to Harvey’s plate of the veins of the forearm. RBH records only the Honeyman copy (Sotheby’s, 1979, £15,400 — for comparison, Honeyman’s two copies of the first-edition Principia made £7,700 and £8,800). The bibliographical complexity of the offprint is itself significant. There were two separate printings, both with separate pagination and register, and both with an ornamental border above the opening of the text. The first was printed from the standing type of the journal and has a half-title but no title page; since it bore no printer’s name and no approbatione, it could not legally be distributed, and only two copies are known (Yale and Columbia). Galvani then corrected a number of errors, had the first gathering reset, and added a title page with the notice “cum approbatione.” It was this second version — the version offered here — that was distributed publicly, and it is therefore this version that has priority as the edition through which Galvani’s work first reached the wider world. OCLC records verified copies at the Bodleian, the University of British Columbia, Harvard, the Huntington, the University of Oklahoma, and the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, with further copies at the University of Bologna and the Hagströmer Library in Stockholm. A book edition with notes by Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini and a report by Bassano Carminati of Volta’s repetition of the experiments was published at Modena several months later (dated 1792), with the plates re-engraved and printed on three sheets instead of four. The question of exactly when the offprint appeared has now been settled by Walter Bernardi, who examined the manuscript correspondence of Sebastiano Canterzani (1734–1818), secretary of the Bologna Academy of Sciences, in the University Library of Bologna. The seventh volume of the Commentarii, though its imprimatur was dated 27 March 1791, was not published until the beginning of 1792, perhaps on 2 or 3 January. The delay in printing was a characteristic feature of the Commentarii, whose small circulation made it an ineffective vehicle for scientific communication — which is precisely why Galvani had the offprints pulled separately. No definitely dated reaction to the paper is earlier than 3 April 1792, when Carminati, the professor of medicine at Pavia, acknowledged receipt of a copy that the Abbé Felice Fontana had brought him. Carminati’s letter of acknowledgement, as Fulton and Cushing noted, first drew the attention of the learned world to Galvani’s studies and inaugurated the controversy with Volta that immediately followed. Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna, had been investigating the effect of electrical discharges on prepared frog specimens since the late 1770s, building on the earlier work of Beccaria, Leopoldo Caldani, Felice Fontana, and Tommaso Laghi on the electrical stimulation of nerves and muscles. The initial observation, described in the De viribus electricitatis, occurred when a dissected frog lay on a table on which there was an electrical machine. An assistant touched the inner crural nerve of the frog with the point of a scalpel, and violent contractions of the leg muscles occurred simultaneously with the discharge of a spark from the machine. The contractions occurred only when the scalpel blade was grounded through the experimenter’s hand touching the iron rivets that held the blade to the handle; if the blade was insulated, nothing happened. Galvani did not know that the insulated frog was being charged by induction from the machine and discharged through the grounded scalpel — a mechanism no different in principle from the electrical stimulation experiments of the preceding thirty years. But the observation puzzled him, and like any good experimentalist he varied the parameters. He moved outdoors, suspending prepared frog legs from copper hooks on an iron railing. He found that the legs contracted not only during thunderstorms but in calm weather as well. Impatient at the long wait between contractions in fair weather, he began to press the copper hook against the iron railing and discovered that contractions were produced reliably, apparently independent of atmospheric conditions. He brought the experiment indoors: a frog placed on an iron plate contracted whenever the brass hook attached to its backbone was pressed against the plate. He varied the metals and found that the intensity of the contractions depended on the combination used; when he substituted non-conductors — glass, gum, resin, stone, dry wood — no contractions occurred. From these results Galvani concluded that an electric fluid must reside in the animal itself, and he likened the process of its flowing from the nerves into the muscles to the discharge of a Leyden jar. He developed this conclusion into a complete theory of animal electricity, summarised by Emil du Bois-Reymond in five propositions: that animals possess a peculiar electricity of their own; that its chief organ of secretion is the brain; that the nerve conducts it while its oily outer layer prevents dispersal; that the muscles receive and store it like a Leyden jar, negative on the outside and positive on the inside; and that the mechanism of motion consists in the discharge of this stored fluid from the inside of the muscle through the nerve to the outside. Volta’s first public reaction, given in an address at the University of Pavia on 5 May 1792, was cordial and admiring. He described the treatise as one of those great and brilliant discoveries that deserved to mark a new era in the annals of physics and medicine, but he added that he wanted more convincing proofs to overcome his scepticism about animal electricity. He did not at this stage object to Galvani’s experiments, only to the inference that they proved the existence of an intrinsic animal electricity; he was prepared to consider that the electricity might come from the contact of two different metals in a moist environment. Two letters to Tiberius Cavallo in London, read at the Royal Society in 1793, presented Volta’s own repetitions of the experiments and his growing conviction that the metals, not the animal tissue, were the source of the electrical stimulus: the organs of the animal, Volta concluded, act only passively. By the end of 1793 he had rejected animal electricity altogether and had begun to work out the theory that would lead, seven years later, to the Voltaic pile. Galvani, a retiring man who shrank from public controversy, left his defence largely to his nephew Aldini, whose De animalis electricae theoriae ortu atque incrementis appeared as a preface to the Modena book edition of 1792 and was followed by further publications in 1793 and 1794. But Galvani himself made one last, crucial contribution. In an anonymous book of 1794, Dell’uso e dell’attività dell’arco conduttore nella contrazione dei muscoli, he described an experiment in which muscular contraction was produced by touching the exposed muscle of one frog with the nerve of another — without any metal at all. This was the first demonstration that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, and it established, against Volta, that Galvani had been at least partly right: the animal body does generate electricity, even if the bimetallic contact experiments that had started the controversy were caused by contact electricity rather than animal electricity. In retrospect, both men were partly right and partly wrong. Galvani was correct that electrical forces are involved in the functioning of living tissue but wrong in attributing the bimetallic contractions to animal electricity. Volta correctly denied that the bimetallic effect was caused by an animal electricity but wrong in implying that every electrophysiological phenomenon requires two different metals as its source. The practical consequence of the controversy, however, dwarfed the theoretical question. In 1800, one year after Galvani’s death, Volta showed that if alternating discs of copper and zinc are stacked in a column, each pair separated from the next by a moistened cardboard disc, a greatly increased electrical effect is produced — one that can deliver a shock, and that can be discharged and recharged indefinitely. The Voltaic pile was the first source of a continuous electric current and the ancestor of every modern battery. Before it, electricity was available only at high potential and in short surges; after it, the potential could be chosen at will and continuous currents at constant amperage were available for the first time. The pile made possible the electrolytic decomposition of compounds and the isolation of new chemical elements, the discovery of electromagnetism by Ørsted in 1820, the development of the telegraph, and ultimately the entire infrastructure of electrical power on which modern civilisation depends. Provenance: Dr. André Dénier (bookplate), physician and local historian from La Tour-du-Pin (Isère), who published numerous medical books and scholarly works on the Dauphiné region and owned an extensive library of works on the Dauphiné and the sciences. A description from Maggs, dated 7 December 1937, is loosely inserted. The continuous current made possible by Volta’s pile set in train the nineteenth-century unification of three hitherto separate sciences. In 1820 Ørsted demonstrated that a current in a wire deflects a magnetic needle, linking the science Galvani had opened to the magnetism whose founding text — Peregrinus’s letter of 1269 — had appeared in print for the first time at Augsburg in 1558; and in 1865 Maxwell, in a memoir published in the Philosophical Transactions, identified light itself as an electromagnetic wave, linking both to the wave theory founded in Huygens’s Traité de la lumière of 1690. Dibner, Heralds of Science 59; Evans 34; Fulton & Stanton 3; Garrison-Morton 593; Grolier/Norman, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 50; Grolier/Horblit 37a; Norman 869; Printing and the Mind of Man 240; Waller 11346; Wheeler Gift 575. Cohen, critical introduction to Foley (tr.), Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion, 1953. Bernardi, “The Controversy on Animal Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” in Bevilacqua & Fragonese (eds.), Nova Voltiana, vol. 1, 101–114. Piccolino & Bresadola, Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience, 2013.
4to (297 x 212 mm), pp. [ii], 3-58, with the original front and rear blanks and with four folding engraved plates (some light browning and foxing). Later marbled wrappers. Preserved in a slipcase.
Item #6576
Price: $195,000.00
