Page:Life in Motion.djvu/201

gated. These remarkable creatures are of interest to us at present because the electrical Fig. 72.—Torpedo Galvani, showing the prisms of the electric organ as seen from the dorsal surface. Each organ contains about 800 prisms, and each prism is divided by delicate membranous plates, separated from each other by a jelly-like fluid. Each prism has about 600 plates, and as there are 800 prisms in each electric organ, the organ contains about half a million electric plates, each of which is supplied by a nerve filament. The figure shows the large nerve trunks, b, ending in the smaller nerves, a, distributed to the prisms. See next figure. organs of many of them are, in a sense, modified muscular structures. Thus in the ray called the torpedo (Torpedo Galvani) of the Medi-