This article examines the science of electrophysiology developed by Emil du BoisReymond in Berlin in the 1840s. In it I recount his major findings, the most significant being his proof of the electrical nature of nerve signals. Du Bois-Reymond also went on to detect this same ' negative variation', or action current, in live human subjects. In 1850 he travelled to Paris to defend this startling claim. The essay concludes with a discussion of why his demonstration failed to convince his hosts at the French Academy of Sciences.

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at Denver "Every industrious and ambitious man of science ... is Humboldt's son; we are all his family." Emil du Bois-Reyrnond to Carl Ludwig, 26 June 1849 "That's always been my dream. To have the latest scientific equipment in the middle of nowhere." Michael 1. Balick, in conversation with Claudia Dreifus, "New York's a jungle, and one scientist doesn't mind", The New York Times, Tuesday, 6 April 1999, F5 "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust THE PICTUREAdolph Schlagintweit began his last watercolour on 5 August 1857. It took him five hours to finish, though he had been careful to get up early enough to fix the light of his painting at half past nine in the morning, a good time for depicting the slopes and contours of the mountains around him. He worked with his habitual care in rendering the details. of the landscape in the panorama before himthe rock outcrops, the sparse vegetation, the fresh snowfall. From his vantage at the crest of the pass he could make out a line of peaks marking the Kunlun mountains stretch away from either side of him. Below that the plain of Eastern Turkestan remained hidden by fog. It was a fitting scene. No European since Marco Polo had crossed through this region of Central Asia, and that was more than five hundred years ago. Schlagintweit aimed to be the first Westerner to revisit the legendary city of Kashgar. If his goal was clear, his motivation was not. It is not enough for us to say, echoing G. T. Mallory, "Because it is there", Much like the entire enterprise of scientific exploration, the meaning of Schlagintweit's three-year trek through India and High Asia is anything but self-evident. It really makes sense only against the background of history, where, like Schlagintweit at his painting, we can locate and map and consider. This essay will illustrate the Schlagintweits' mission by positioning it within three contexts: one of aesthetics, one of politics, and one of religion. In this way the story of the Schlagintweits can help reveal some of the strangeness and fascination behind the image of nineteenth-century science.

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