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The flat and evil-looking fish, of the genus Torpedo lies quivering on a wet napkin. A wire extends from the napkin to a nearby basin of water. A man holds a finger in the basin and another finger in another basin. A second man holds one finger in the second basin and another finger in a third basin. And so on--until the eighth man, with his finger in the seventh basin, touches a wire to the back of the fish, a ray. Then, although none of the men is touching the fish or any other person, all of them "felt a commotion." So reports John Walsh, a Member of Parliament and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. The experiment, adds Walsh, opens "a large field for inquiry, both to the electrician in his walk of physics, and to all who consider the animal oeconomy."

Electricity has been known to mankind since the 6th century B.C., when Thales of Miletus observed that amber, if rubbed, would attract bits of feathers and other light objects (the Greek word for amber is elektron). Only in modern times, however, have scientists discovered that some kind of electricity exists in most things, and in 1752 Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his kite that it can be drawn from the sky. But what is electricity? What causes it? Where is it most evident in nature? These questions are much in the air nowadays, and almost every issue of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions contains some report of new experiments with electric eels and rays. Among the latest:

> Researcher Walsh, after exploring how an 18-inch ray transmits its shock through water, also tried to find out how often the fish can perform this feat. By plunging a captive ray rapidly up and down in a trough of water, he discovered that it could give off about 100 shocks during 20 plunges in the course of three minutes.

> Dr. John Hunter, who became Surgeon Extraordinary to King George III last January, dissected male and female rays to analyze "the peculiar organs by which that animal produces so extraordinary an effect." The two organs, on either side of the cranium and gills, are about 5 inches long and consist of more than 400 tiny vertical columns of fluid. Three large nerves connect the organs to the brain. Although Hunter is not sure how the shocks are created, he asserts that "the will of the animal does absolutely control the electric powers of its body."

> Dr. William Bryant of Trenton performed tests on a torpedo of Surinam and proved that it could send a shock "through metallic substances, like an old sword blade," but when the sword was "armed with sealing wax, the electric fluid would not pass."

> When Bryant's tests were reported to the American Philosophical Society, the A.P.S. formed a committee to arrange with the "owner of a torpedo or torporific eel [to] determine the nature of the shocks which it communicates." The offered price: -L- 3. Physician Hugh Williamson later discovered, among other things, that the eel can stun fish at a distance, and "it can give a small shock, a severe one or not at all, just as circumstances may require."

The latest experiment, about to be published in the 1776 Philosophical Transactions, is by Henry Cavendish, the eccentric British millionaire chemist who has been investigating the properties of hydrogen. Instead of testing what electric fish actually do, Cavendish attempted to duplicate their actions by creating an artificial ray and then passing an electric current through it from a battery of the devices known as Leyden phials. He constructed a fish out of wood, with the shock organs made of pewter, but he was dissatisfied with the results, partly because the artificial fish gave off weaker shocks when submerged under water. Cavendish's conclusion was cautious: "On the whole, I think there seems nothing in the phenomena of the torpedo at all incompatible with electricity."

These experiments may seem somewhat unpractical, but they illustrate modern scientists' belief that all ideas should be checked by experiment, and nothing taken for granted. Only by such experiments, they say, can it be discovered whether electricity will ever have any useful purpose.

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