NATURE'S INVENTIONS.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12470, 22 February 1909, Page 4

NATURE'S INVENTIONS.

The most: remarkable and "interesting of inventions is the electric 'battery. : . When . ; ihe philosopher, Franklin^ was .maMiig hig first experiments ,wMi what is vulgarly know as the ' 'mysterious fluid," it would have surprised him very much to learn that ne' had been long anticipated in the field by a fish. Yet it is a fact that storage batteries of excellent construction and a high type of efficiency have f _ been i u existence for thousands, and 'presumably for millions of years. ■ The so-called torpedo ray, not distantly related to : the common skate, frequently weighing Seventy-five lbs, is a familiar species in some waters. Specimens are frequently captured, but fishermen "are careful how they handle them, knowing that they are literally, "loaded," and that one of them can inflict a shotsk severe enough to knock a man down-. This. extraordinary fish carries two storage batteries—large oval masses, one 011 each side of the head , coinposed of hexagonal cells, which are .miuiatui-e Leycten jars. The outfit is directly connected h with the brain, and it> has now been found that it may be disabled by, cutting the big nerves' which connect it with the cereoral (brain) apparatus. Physiologists say that the batteries are modified m'usle structure "and that the energy stored in them is supplied from tne nerve centres— a fact, which appears to confir-m the recently promulgated theory that all nerve. energy is electrical.. There is, however, another kind of fish, similarly equipped, which is much more powerful. 1-V is called the elec;tric : eel, and. attains a length of eight feet,--with: a thickness as great as that of a man's thigh, weighing fifty pounds or more. -This' creature is a living storage battery. In its tail, which is four fifths of its length are two huge masses of elongated form composed of prism shaped cells, 240. of them to the inch, with a jelly-like substance. These are Leydeiv jars, and the masses are: a pair of batteries, j Two 'more, constituting an auxiliary 1 pair, of similar structure", run along the sides at the base of the anal tin. The whole apparatus is connected by hundreds -of nerve .branches with the central -nervous system, and is capable of liberating a sufficientamount of electricity to paralyse a man. - - - The inventor of the Yale lock doubtless thought he had hit upon something original. As a matter of facti he was infringing one-pf Na-_ ture's own patents. For there is a :vory common -kind of fish, found in the ■Red. Sea, and known to science "as Mbnacanthus, which employs for its own purposes exactly the same contrivances.'.- ■_ The Arab boy kuows this little fish well. It lives among the coral reefs, and, when pursued, retreats into. a convenient hole, thereupon elevating a spike-like back fin.: If, as is "usually the case, the cavity is small, the rihny fugitive cannot be pulled out unless the spike is lowered; and this can be accomplished by pulling down a lesser spike behind it v : : -'"It" is a catch' mechanism, exactly like that of the Yale lock. Botb principle and , operation are the same. .;