At this time the science of comparative anatomy was just beginning to attract widespread attention. John Hunter, in London, was doing a great work in this line, which placed him in the front rank of contributors to biology and collectors of important facts in all the sciences allied to anatomy and physiology. Galvani's work on birds, then, made him a pioneer in the biological sciences that were to attract so much attention during the nineteenth century. His experimental work in comparative anatomy, strange as it might seem, and apparently not to be expected, led him into the domain of electricity, through the observation of certain phenomena of animal electricity and the effects of electrical currents on animals. Like so many other great discoveries in science, Galvani's first attraction to his subject of animal electricity is often said to have been the result of a happy accident. Of course it is easy to talk of accidents in these cases. Archimedes and his bath; the fall of the apple for Newton; Laennec's observation of the boys tapping on a log in the courtyard of the Louvre and the ready conduction of sound, from which he got his idea for the invention of the stethoscope; Lord Kelvin's eye-glass falling and showing him how a weightless arm for his electrometer might be obtained in a beam of light,--may all be called happy accidents if you will. Without the inventive scientific genius ready to take advantage of them, however, these accidents would not have been raised to the higher plane of important incidents in the history of science. These phenomena had probably occurred under men's eyes hundreds of times before, but there was no great mind ready to receive the seeds of thought suggested, nor to follow out the conclusions so obviously indicated. Galvani's observation of the twitching of the muscles of the frog under the influence of electricity, may be called one of the happy accidents of scientific development, but it was Galvani's own genius that made the accident happy. There are two stories told as to the method of the first observation in this matter. Both of them make his wife an important factor in the discovery. According to a popular but less authentic form of the history, Galvani was engaged in preparing some frogs' legs as a special dainty for his wife, who was ill and liked this delicacy very much. He thought so much of her that he was doing this himself, in the hope that she would be thus more readily tempted to eat them. While so engaged, he exposed the large nerve of the animal's hind legs, and at the same time split the skin covering the muscles. In doing this he touched the nerve muscle preparation, as this has come to be called, with the scalpel and the forceps simultaneously, with the result that twitchings occurred. While seeking the cause of these twitchings, the idea of animal electricity came to him.