1. Henry Cavendish, “Some Attempts to imitate the Effects of the Torpedo by Electricity,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London, 66 (1776): 196–225
2. Henry Cavendish, “Some Attempts to imitate the Effects of the Torpedo by Electricity,” in Electrical Researches of Hon. Henry Cavendish James Clerk Maxwell, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1879), 194–215.
3. John Heilbron in his important study, Electricity, constrains this narrower meaning of the term physics by including much of the study of meteorological, and physiological electrical phenomena and electricity in animals and fish only as they were brought into the laboratory and were necessary to narrate the conceptual developments in the field. His physics is too modern. Luigi Galvani and his work on frogs appears from a narrative vacuum. This has been noted also by Robert Palter, “Some Impressions of Recent Work in Eighteenth-Century Science,” Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. 19 (1989): 349–401.
4. As an antidote see, Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
5. Giuliano Pancaldi, “Electricity and Life: Volta’s Path to the Battery,” Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci. 21 (1990): 123–160.