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Updated: June 9, 2025
I did not hear of this mode of treatment in the Spanish colonies which I visited; and I can assert that, after having made experiments during four hours successively with gymnoti, M. Bonpland and myself felt, till the next day, a debility in the muscles, a pain in the joints, and a general uneasiness, the effect of a strong irritation of the nervous system.
Moreover, he is not even yet quite recovered from the damage done him by the gymnoti; their electricity still acting on his nervous system, and producing a certain lassitude. There is yet another reason why Ludwig has let himself go to sleep one of a moral nature.
The combined effect of the horses' hoofs and the men's shrieks was, that numbers of the hideous-looking gymnoti issued from the mud in which they lay hid and came to the surface of the water, when they simultaneously made a dash at the unfortunate animals swimming and floundering about. The scene was a most extraordinary one.
They are drowned from the impossibility of rising amid the prolonged struggle between the other horses and the eels. We had little doubt that the fishing would terminate by killing successively all the animals engaged; but by degrees the impetuosity of this unequal combat diminished, and the wearied gymnoti dispersed.
We at first wished to make our experiments in the house we inhabited at Calabozo; but the dread of the shocks caused by the gymnoti is so great, and so exaggerated among the common people, that during three days we could not obtain one, though they are easily caught, and we had promised the Indians two piastres for every strong and vigorous fish.
We will not, however, conclude from this, that the gymnoti are insensible to electricity; and that they cannot fight with each other at the bottom of the pools. Their nervous system must be subject to the same agents as the nerves of other animals.
Having placed four gymnoti, of unequal strength, in such a manner as to receive the shocks of the most vigorous fish by contact, that is to say, by touching only one of the other fishes, I did not observe that these last were agitated at the moment when the current passed their bodies. Perhaps the current did not penetrate below the humid surface of the skin.
Placing but little value on mules and horses, they collect a number of these animals, and, armed with harpoons and long slender rods, drive them with shouts towards a pool inhabited by gymnoti.
This is a Carapa, not scaly, and without an electric organ. The gymnoti, like our eels, are fond of swallowing and breathing air on the surface of the water; but we must not thence conclude that the fish would perish if it could not come up to breathe the air.
After the experiments I had made on gymnoti, it became highly interesting to me, on my return to Europe, to ascertain with precision the various circumstances in which another electric fish, the torpedo of our seas, gives or does not give shocks. Though this fish had been examined by numerous men of science, I found all that had been published on its electrical effects extremely vague.
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