GALVANI, Luigi.

De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius. [With:] ALDINI, Giovanni. De animali electricitate dissertationes duae. Bologna: Press of the Academy of Sciences, 1794. [With:] GALVANI, Luigi. De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius cum Joannis Aldini dissertatione et notis. Accesserunt epistolae ad animalis electricitatis theoriam pertinentes. Modena: apud Societatem Typographicam, 1792.

Bologna: Press of the Academy of Sciences, 1791.

First edition — the separately issued offprint, distributed before the journal volume appeared and therefore the true first edition — of the paper “which inaugurated the modern epoch in electricity” (Evans): Galvani’s report that the leg of a dissected frog contracts when nerve and muscle are joined through two different metals, the animal itself serving as the instrument that reveals the current. Four engraved plates by his friend Jacopo Zambelli show the dissections and the electrical apparatus; with Harvey’s plate of the veins of the arm they are the most famous of all illustrations in the history of biology. Electricity had been recognised for centuries, but only the man-made apparatus of the eighteenth century turned its study into a science. That it was somehow involved in living tissue had been noticed in the electric fishes and eels, but it was Galvani, professor of anatomy at Bologna, who first carried out systematic experiments showing that muscular contraction results from an electric current (Grolier, Medicine, p. 183). Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) repeated the experiments, correctly read the effect as contact electricity between the metals, and was led directly to the ‘Voltaic pile’ — the first source of a continuous electric current and the ancestor of the electric battery.

The offprint exists in two separate printings, each with its own pagination and register and an ornamental border above the opening of the article. The earlier was printed from the standing type of the journal, with a half-title but no title page; only two copies are known, John Fulton’s own (ex-Gherardi), now at Yale, and the ex-Amati copy sold by Quaritch in 2005, almost certainly the copy now at Columbia. Since it names no printer and carries no approval of the text, it could not legally have been distributed, and the two copies must have been made for Galvani’s own use; Fulton and Stanton record no presentation copy of it (p. 166). Galvani then corrected a number of errors, had the first gathering reset, and added a title page with the approval notice (‘cum approbatione’). This is the version that went out to his colleagues: the copy that reached Volta came through his Pavia colleague Carminati (“a cui comunicai il primo la vostra dissertazione,” as Carminati told Galvani), and the copy Volta inscribed “Ex dono Auctoris” passed through Silvanus P. Thompson’s library into the Burndy Library formed by Bern Dibner (Heralds of Science 59). It is therefore this version, offered here, that first communicated Galvani’s discoveries to the scientific world. The volume of the Commentarii containing the article did not appear until the beginning of 1792, after the offprint of 1791; Fulton and Cushing’s ‘original publication’ and ‘reprint’ numbering (p. 251) describes the typesetting, not the chronology, and their own text records that the volume was evidently not distributed until later, while the offprints were distributed in 1791 or early in 1792.

This copy of the offprint is bound with two further works. The last is the book edition of Galvani’s paper, published several months later at Modena (dated 1792), with notes and commentary by Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834), Galvani’s nephew and principal apologist, and with Don Bassano Carminati’s report of Volta’s repetition of the experiments; for the book edition the plates were re-engraved and printed on three sheets instead of four. The second work is Aldini’s account of his own further experiments: the first dissertation reports, against Volta’s assertions, contractions of frog muscle obtained through a perfectly homogeneous arc of liquid quicksilver (Piccolino & Bresadola, p. 179); the second shows that animal electricity could be excited in a vacuum as well as in air.

Copies of the offprint are recorded at the Bodleian, the University of British Columbia, Harvard, the Huntington, the University of Oklahoma, and the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris; there are also copies at the University of Bologna and the Hagströmer Library, Stockholm. With the Yale, Columbia, Burndy, Honeyman, and present copies added, well over a dozen copies can be traced today, so that Silvanus P. Thompson’s belief (Hand-list of the Magnetic and Electrical Books, 1914) that ‘not more than 12 copies were printed’ cannot stand as a figure, though few copies have appeared at auction: Honeyman’s (Sotheby’s, 5 November 1979, lot 1428) and, in September 2025, a copy sold at Lyon. Aldini’s Dissertationes are of comparable rarity — no copy is recorded in any American institution.

By the end of the eighteenth century the connexion between nervous action and electricity had been under investigation for some time: Newton, discussing the properties of the aether, had suggested that an electric spirit might carry sensation to the brain along the nerves and produce muscular reactions, and Haller had experimented in search of a connexion between electrical action and muscular reflexes. It was Galvani who provided, as he thought, the dramatic experiments on what was called ‘animal electricity’ and afterwards ‘galvanism’. He observed that a frog’s leg convulsed when a nerve was touched with a scalpel at the moment a nearby electrical machine discharged a spark; then that contraction followed when one metal touched the nerve, another the muscle, and the two metals were brought together — no machine and no spark required. As a physiologist he took the electricity to reside in the animal itself, as in the electric eel, the metal serving only as conductor; he did not realise that he had found not a new physiological source of electricity but a new source of continuous electric flow in chemical action. It was Volta, a physicist, who showed that the animal was inessential to ‘galvanic’ electricity and built the first battery to drive a current by chemical action (Printing and the Mind of Man).

The practical consequence was the electric current itself. Before Galvani, electricity was available only at high potential and in short surges of charge, as in spark discharges; with the battery the potential could be chosen at will and continuous currents drawn at constant amperage, and its development, with the physical principles that came with it, opened a new era in physics. In chemistry the battery decomposed compounds, isolated new elements, and led to an understanding of the forces that bind the parts of molecules. Cohen’s point (p. 29) is that these revolutions in physics, chemistry and engineering all descend from the publication of Galvani’s book — the product of an investigation whose aim was to disprove his fundamental postulate of animal electricity.

During the 1770s Galvani’s research had moved from anatomy towards physiology, and specifically towards nerves and muscles. He read a paper on Hallerian irritability to the Istituto delle Scienze in 1772, discussed the muscular movement of frogs before the same body in 1773, and reported on the effect of opiates on frog nerves in 1774. These interests fused with the slightly earlier eighteenth-century studies, several of them Italian, on the electrical stimulation of nerves and muscles; taking up where Beccaria, Leopoldo Caldani, Felice Fontana, and Tommaso Laghi had left off, Galvani began in late 1780 an extensive and meticulous series of investigations into the responses that static electricity elicited from properly prepared frogs (DSB).

The initial observation, as Galvani describes it in the De viribus, came when a dissected frog lay on a table beside an electrical machine: violent contractions of the limb followed when an assistant touched the inner crural nerve with the point of a scalpel, simultaneously with the discharge of a spark, and only when the scalpel was grounded through the experimenter’s finger on the iron nails fastening the blade to its handle — held by the bone alone, with the blade insulated, it produced nothing. What puzzled Galvani was that the contractions came even when the frog was completely insulated from the machine and at a distance from it. He did not know that the insulated frog was most probably charged by induction, so that grounding the nerve at the instant of discharge sent the charge through scalpel and experimenter, and that the sudden change of potential at the point of contact would produce a contraction of the kind excited electrically in living and dead animals for at least thirty years past (Cohen, pp. 27–28). He varied the parameters. He exchanged the machine for the charges of thunder-clouds and found that frog preparations hung by copper hooks from an iron railing contracted not only in storms but in calm weather too; impatient at the long wait between contractions, he began to scrape and press the copper hook, fastened to the frog’s backbone, against the iron railing, and found that contractions could be produced almost at will, independently of the weather. Indoors the same result followed when the frog lay on an iron plate and the brass hook was brought against it, and the experiment was repeated in different places, at different times of day, and with different metals: the intensity of the contractions varied with the metals, and non-conductors — glass, gum, resin, stone, dry wood — gave none at all. Galvani concluded that an electric fluid must reside in the animal itself, and likened the flow of a fine nervous fluid from nerves into muscles to the discharge of a Leyden jar.

The rest of the book explores the action of this postulated animal electricity, or animal nervous electric fluid, in producing contraction in cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals. Emil du Bois-Reymond later reduced the theory to five propositions: that animals possess an electricity peculiar to themselves; that the nerves are the organs with the greatest affinity for it and the brain its principal organ of secretion; that the inner substance of the nerve conducts the electricity while the outer oily layer prevents its dispersal and allows it to accumulate; that the muscles receive it and behave like a Leyden jar, negative outside and positive within; and that motion consists in the discharge of this muscular Leyden jar from the inside of the muscle through the nerve to the outside, the discharge stimulating the irritable fibres to contract. Such, in Cohen’s account, were the bases of galvanism (pp. 27–28).

The treatise was issued in 1791, but exactly when it appeared was long unclear. The imprimatur at the end of the journal volume is dated 27 March 1791, yet nearly a year passed before the first repercussions were heard. Volta’s own acknowledgement of his copy is lost, and one must be content with that of his Pavia colleague, the professor of medicine Don Bassano Carminati, who on 3 April 1792 acknowledged receipt of what was presumably another copy, brought to him by a mutual friend, the Abbé Felice Fontana. Carminati reported the interest the paper had aroused among his colleagues, and in particular that Spallanzani and Volta had ventured other explanations than animal electricity for the convulsive movements; Galvani replied at length on 8 May, citing further observations — one on a human arm and leg amputated that very day — that seemed to favour his own interpretation and to bring nearer the solution of the most important problem in physiology, the physical cause of voluntary movement (Cohen, pp. 159–160).

Volta’s first public reaction came in an address at the Aula of the University of Pavia on 5 May 1792, on the occasion of a ‘promotion’ ceremony. As Cameron Walker showed, Volta took no vigorous exception to Galvani’s work at this stage, only to his conclusion; he was prepared to allow that the electricity might come from an inherent animal electricity, but wanted “more convincing proofs to overcome my lack of faith with regard to animal electricity” — a doubt directed not at the experiments but at the inference that they proved animal electricity to exist. Other passages of that first memoir are cordial and admiring, and it is clear from them that on 5 May Volta had done little more than digest the treatise and had not yet repeated the experiments: he calls the paper of “Signor A. Galvani” “one of those great and brilliant discoveries which deserves to mark a new era” in physics and medicine. More specifically, Volta believed that the convulsions Galvani described were due to currents generated by friction — ‘frictional’ rather than ‘animal’ electricity. The rejoinder came from the youthful Aldini, who must have had his uncle’s permission: under an imprimatur dated 28 July 1792 he issued from a Modena press (Cohen writes Mantua) a reprint of the De viribus — the third work in the present volume — with the Galvani–Carminati correspondence and a 26-page commentary of his own, De animalis electricae theoriae ortu atque incrementis. From then on, with a single exception, the public defence of animal electricity was heard not from Galvani but from the irrepressible Aldini, to whom, rather than to Galvani, Volta addressed some of his published correspondence; in 1793 and again in 1794 Aldini read a dissertation on the subject before the Institute of Bologna, the two being published together in the latter year — the second work in the present volume — and reprinted in English translation in 1803 (Cohen, pp. 159–160).

In the first of the 1794 dissertations Aldini explains his entry into the controversy: the attacks on Galvani’s system reached him while his uncle, primarily a physician and anatomist, was treating him for a deadly fever, and having escaped an almost unavoidable death through Galvani’s care he set to work in support of a doctrine he trusted, glad to serve the truth and at the same time “to provide Galvani with a public account of my gratitude” (from the 1803 English translation). Among Aldini’s major contributions to galvanism is the demonstration that contraction in frogs can be obtained with a single metal: with purified mercury as the only link between the crural nerve and the leg muscles, contraction followed every time the three elements of the arc — nerve, mercury, muscle in either order — were brought into contact. The experiment, first reported as a note in the second edition of Galvani’s Commentary (1792), drew the praise of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who wrote that Aldini had opened a safer avenue and surpassed all his forerunners in “the variety and fineness of his experiments” and the ingenuity of his method, only to meet the fate of anyone whose results overturn an accepted theory: his facts were denied and he was accused of error. Volta indeed at once charged Aldini with misreading his own results, arguing from his concept of bimetallic electricity that the mercury had not been sufficiently purified and contained traces of at least one other metal; it was this reaction that led both Aldini and Galvani to the series of experiments in which no metal of any kind was used, contraction being obtained simply by applying the cut end of the crural nerve to the leg muscles (Parent, pp. 578–579).

The number of Volta’s publications on galvanism is itself a measure of the subject’s fascination. Two letters to Tiberius Cavallo in England, written in the autumn of 1792, read before the Royal Society in 1793 and printed in the Philosophical Transactions, set out Galvani’s discoveries together with Volta’s own experiments and observations; although Volta still professed a belief in animal electricity, he indicated that the stimulus in Galvani’s experiments was the junction of two different metals through a moist body, and that the metals applied to the moist bodies of animals could by themselves “excite and dislodge the electric fluid from its state of rest,” the organs of the animal acting only passively. By the end of 1793 he had rejected animal electricity altogether and begun to work out his own theory; and one year after Galvani’s death he found the device that made the feeble galvanic effect strong. A column of pairs of discs, copper and zinc, each pair separated from the next by a disc of moistened cardboard, gave a greatly increased effect — enough to shock an experimenter touching the copper at one end and the zinc at the other — and gave it again and again, like a Leyden jar that restored its own charge after each discharge, with “an inexhaustible charge, a perpetual action or impulsion on the electric fluid.” So the battery and the continuous current were discovered (Cohen, pp. 30–33).

In retrospect both men were partly right and partly wrong: Galvani was right to attribute the contractions to an electrical stimulus and wrong to identify its source, in these experiments, as an ‘animal electricity’; Volta was right to deny the animal electricity and wrong to imply that every electrophysiological effect required two different metals as its source. Galvani, shrinking from the controversy, went on with his work as teacher, obstetrician and surgeon, treating wealthy and needy alike without regard to fee, and in 1794 defended his position in an anonymous book, Dell’uso e dell’attività dell’arco conduttore nella contrazione dei muscoli, whose supplement described contraction without any metal at all: by touching the exposed muscle of one frog with the nerve of another he established for the first time that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue (Britannica).

The journal volume containing Galvani’s paper bears the same imprint and date as the present offprint, and Cohen could only say of the treatise that “just when it appeared is not clear” (p. 159). Walter Bernardi has since answered the question from the manuscript correspondence of Sebastiano Canterzani (1734–1819), secretary of the Bologna Academy of Sciences from 1766, in the University Library of Bologna: the seventh volume of the Commentarii is dated 1791 and its imprimatur was granted on 27 March, but it was published at the beginning of 1792, “perhaps on January 2 or 3” (Bernardi, p. 102). The delay was typical of the Commentarii, the official organ of the Bologna Institute of Sciences that collected its members’ research, and this, with its small circulation, made it a poor vehicle for scientific communication; Galvani therefore had a few copies of the De viribus printed separately, probably in 1791, and sent them to various scientists, one of them reaching Volta at Pavia in March 1792 (Piccolino & Bresadola, pp. 143–144). The long delay in printing the volume explains why, despite the profound interest his discoveries eventually excited, there was no reaction before 1792. The earliest dated reactions come from Bologna and Padua: Aldini defended the ‘new animal electricity’ at the public anatomical ceremony in the Archiginnasio at the end of January or beginning of February 1792, and Leopoldo Caldani wrote to Felice Fontana on 3 March that, as the last volume of the Bologna Academy showed, ‘we come back to electricity’ (Bernardi, pp. 104, 109); at Pavia the first dated reaction is Carminati’s letter of 3 April 1792 acknowledging his copy of the offprint. It was Carminati’s letter of acknowledgement to Galvani that, in Fulton and Cushing’s words (p. 258), “first drew the attention of the learned world to Galvani’s studies” and, in their account, inaugurated the controversy with Volta that immediately followed; Bernardi has since shown that a public polemic between Galvanians and Hallerians was already under way at Bologna before the first copies reached Pavia (pp. 103–104).

References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 59 — Printing and the Mind of Man 240 — Norman 869 — Horblit, One Hundred Books Famous in Science 37a — Evans 34 — Garrison-Morton 593 — Grolier, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 50 — Osler 1243 — Waller 11346 — Wellcome III, p. 86 — Wheeler Gift 575 — Fulton and Stanton, Galvani 3 — Bernardi, ‘The Controversy on Animal Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Galvani, Volta and Others,’ in Nova Voltiana. Studies on Volta and His Times, edited by F. Bevilacqua and L. Fragonese, Vol. 1, pp. 101–114 — De Andrade Martins, ‘Romagnosi and Volta’s Pile: Early Difficulties in the Interpretation of Voltaic Electricity,’ in ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 81–102 — Fulton & Cushing, ‘A Bibliographical Study of the Galvani and the Aldini Writings on Animal Electricity,’ Annals of Science, Vol. 1 (1936), pp. 239–68 with 9 plates — Galvani, Commentary of the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion. Translated into English by Margaret Glover Foley, with Notes and a Critical Introduction by I. Bernard Cohen. Together with a Facsimile of Galvani’s De Viribus . . . and a Bibliography of the Editions and Translations of Galvani’s Book prepared by John Farquhar Fulton and Madeline E. Stanton (1953) — Parent, ‘Giovanni Aldini: from animal electricity to human brain stimulation,’ Canadian Journal of Neurological Science 31 (2004), 576–84 — Piccolino & Bresadola, Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience, Oxford, 2013.

Three works in one vol., 4to (284 × 203 mm). De viribus 1791 (offprint from De Bononiensi scientiarum et artium instituto atque academia commentarii, vol. 7, pp. 363–418): A–G⁴ H²(–H2), pp. [ii], 3–58, with four folding engraved plates (some light foxing); the second issue, with the title reading CUM APPROBATIONE and the reset A gathering (Fulton & Cushing’s no. 3). Dissertationes duae: π² a–e⁴ [f]¹, pp. [iv], XLI, [1, imprimatur on the verso of the final leaf], with 16 figures on two folding engraved plates, one in red, the other in bistre, intaglio device (Mercury and Minerva) printed in red on the title page (faint staining along the upper margin, more evident at the end and on the plates). De viribus 1792: a–b⁴ c⁶(–c6) A–K⁴, pp. xxvi, 80 with three folding engraved plates (some light foxing). Contemporary half-marbled calf and marbled boards, spine with raised bands, a lettering piece, and oval red morocco inlays with fleurons, red edges. A fine copy.

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Item #6759

Price: $195,000.00