I made an experiment with a frog’s leg that indicates something of the kind. I took a leg that was susceptible to galvanic current. The vibration produced a note that was as high as a piccoto. While the leg was alive it responded to the electrical current; when it was dead it would not respond. After the frog’s leg had been lying in the laboratory three days I couldn’t make it squeal. The experiment was conclusive as to this point: The vital force in the nerves of the leg was capable of acting with speed enough to induce the vibration of the diaphragm necessary to produce sound. Certainly this rate of speed is greater than physiologists appear to allow, and it seems reasonable that there is a close affinity between vital energy and electricity. I do not say they are identical; on the contrary I say they are very like. If one could learn to make vital energy directly without fuel, that is without beefsteak in the stomach, and in such manner that the human system could appropriate it, the elixir of life would no longer be a dream of alchemy. But we have not yet learned to make electricity directly, without the aid of fuel and steam. I believe this is possible; indeed, I have been experimenting in this direction for some time past. But until we can learn to make electricity, like nature, out of disturbed air, I am afraid the more delicate task of manufacturing vital energy so that it can be bottled and sold at the family grocery store will have to be deferred. Electricity, by the way, is properly merely a form of energy, and not a fluid. As for the ether which speculative science supposes to exist, I don’t know anything about it. Nobody has discovered anything of the kind. In order to make their theories hold together they have, it seems to me, created the ether. But the ether imagined by them is unthinkable to me. I don’t say I disagree with them, because I don’t pretend to have any theories of that kind, and am not competent to dispute with speculative scientists. All I can say is, my mind is unable to accept the theory. The ether, they say, is as rigid as steel and as soft as butter. I can’t catch on to that idea. I believe that there are only two things in the universe—matter and energy. Matter I can understand to be intelligent, for man himself I regard as so much matter. Energy I know can take various forms, and manifest itself in various ways. I can understand also that it works not only upon, but through, matter. What this matter is, what this energy is, I do not know.