What is galvanic pile?

Famous quotes containing the words galvanic and/or pile:

    ‘Come, walk like this,’ the dancer said,
    ‘Stick you your toes—stick in your head,
    Stalk on with quick, galvanic tread—
    Your fingers thus extend;
    The attitude’s considered quaint,’
    Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)

    That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)