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"The gymnotus sent from Surinam to M. Norderling, at Stockholm, lived more than four months in a state of perfect health. It was twenty-seven inches long; and the shocks it gave were so violent, especially in the open air, that I found scarcely any means of protecting myself by non-conductors, in transporting the fish from one place to another.
Guapo now bethought himself of the narrow escape he himself had had while swimming across to the palm-woods; and the appearance of the gymnotus only rendered him more determined to keep the promise he had made to Leon, that is, that he would revenge him of the caribes. None of them could understand how Guapo was to get his revenge without catching the fish, and that would be difficult to do.
Nothing in the torpedo or in the gymnotus indicates that the animal modifies the electrical state of the bodies by which it is surrounded.
We should still have his researches on the Liquefaction of Gases; on Frictional Electricity; on the Electricity of the Gymnotus; on the source of Power in the Hydro-electric machine, the last two investigations being untouched in the foregoing memoir; on Electro-magnetic Rotations; on Regelation; all his more purely Chemical Researches, including his discovery of Benzol.
A gymnotus that has been kept a long time in captivity, accustoms itself to the imprisonment to which it is reduced; it resumes by degrees the same habits in the tub, which it had in the rivers and marshes. An electrical eel was brought to me at Calabozo: it had been taken in a net, and consequently having no wound.
And along the top of the water glided long and swiftly-swimming snakes, among them the formidable gymnotus, whose electric discharges successively repeated paralyze the most robust of men or animals, and end by dealing death.
Williamson has felt strong shocks when he held only one hand in the water, and this hand, without touching the gymnotus, was placed between it and the small fish towards which the stroke was directed from ten or fifteen inches distance. Philosophical Transactions volume 65 pages 99 and 108.
This contrast reminds the observer, that three functions of animal life, which appear in other respects sufficiently distinct the functions of the brain, those of the electrical organ, and those of the muscles, all require the afflux and concourse of arterial or oxygenated blood. It would be temerity to expose ourselves to the first shocks of a very large and strongly irritated gymnotus.
I touched the gymnotus with a wet pot of brown clay, without effect; yet I received violent shocks when I carried the gymnotus in the same pot, because the contact was greater. When two persons, insulated or otherwise, hold each other's hands, and only one of these persons touches the fish with the hand, either naked or armed with metal, the shock is most commonly felt by both at once.
The European eel will creep during the night upon the grass; but I have seen a very vigorous gymnotus that had sprung out of the water, die on the ground. M. Provencal and myself have proved by our researches on the respiration of fishes, that their humid bronchiae perform the double function of decomposing the atmospheric air, and of appropriating the oxygen contained in water.
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