'At the turn of the twentieth century, the emergence of osmotic concepts within physical chemistry prompted a re-evaluation by some physiologists of the widely-held assumption that the wave-like electrical phenomena produced by nerves was a product of the release of a chemical energy specific to them. [note: 'As influentially proposed by Ludimar Hermann. See Lenoir 1986 19-26 and Finkelstein 2013, 182-187.'] Physical chemists working in the 1880s and 1890s had begun to portray electrical potential as a product of the internal dynamics of battery cells. By introducing a semi-permeable membrane between differently-concentrated solutions of liquids, chemists argued, it was possible to model electrochemical phenomena in terms of the production and release of 'osmotic pressure': galvanic current was produced by the migration of ions between differently-concentrated regions of a battery cell (Barkan 1999, 46-57). At the end of the nineteenth century, Emil Du-Bois Raymond's student Julius Bernstein influentially drew on such contentions to develop a mathematical model of electricity transmission that did not require any expenditure of cell-specific energy: rather, changes in rates of transmission were due to ionic exchange (Lenoir 1986, 39-47).'