30th July 1856
My dear Sir
Your own request,2 without any further stimulus, would be quite sufficient to induce me to give due attention to the paper of M. Matteucci. I have read it through, and although touching upon a controversial topic3 it is I think very temperately written. You doubtless remember the experimental fact demonstrated to the satisfaction of the French Commission,4 that during contraction the muscular current is enfeebled, the needle of the galvanometer not simply approaching zero, but actually swinging to the negative side of it. Du Bois5 states that this reversion of the deflection is no proof that the direction of the current in the muscle is reversed, that such is really not the case, but that the polarization of the platinum plates by the current in its first direction, tending to establish a current in the opposite direction, becomes triumphant, where the muscular current is enfeebled by contraction, and produces the observed effect. Matteucci resorts to plates where no such polarization takes place, and finds that the contraction produces the same effect; hence he concludes that the effect is due to a real discharge of electricity of the muscle during the act of contraction. His experiments and reasoning are marked by great ingenuity: for his facts he must of course be responsible, but the whole character of the paper is such as to entitle it, in my opinion, to a place in the Philosophical Transactions.
Believe me dear Sir │ very sincerely yours │ John Tyndall
Dr. Sharpey │Sec. R.S.
RS MS RR/3/193
William Sharpey: William Sharpey (1802–80; FRS 1839), Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at University College, London. He was Biological Secretary of the Royal Society (1853–72). Tyndall was acting as referee for Matteucci’s paper, ‘Physical and Chemical Phenomena of Muscular Contraction’. It was subsequently published as ‘Electro-Physiological Researches. Physical and Chemical Phenomena of Muscular Contraction – Tenth Series. Part 1’, Phil. Trans. 147 (1857), pp. 129–44. Matteucci was upset by its delayed publication and complained to Faraday on 8 May 1856 (Faraday Correspondence, 5: 3137).
Your own request: request missing.
a controversial topic: Matteucci had long complained that he had priority over Emil Du Bois-Reymond for the discovery and demonstration that nerve fibres conducted an electric current. (For a detailed even-handed account of the controversy, see Giuseppe Moruzzi, ‘The Electrophysiological Work of Carlo Matteucci’, Brain Research Bulletin, 40 (1996), pp. 69–91; first published in Italian in Physis, 6 (1964), pp. 101–40).
French Commission: It is unclear whether this refers to a Committee of the French Academy of Science in 1837 or to a more recent commission.
Du Bois: In his paper (n. 1) Matteucci cited On Animal Electricity: Being an Abstract of the Discoveries of Emil Du Bois Reymond, edited by H. Bence Jones (London: John Churchill, 1852), p. 132.
Please cite as “Tyndall1263,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on