FIG1
J.Z., to give him the title by which he was universally known, initially acquired an interest in cephalopods when working in Naples with Enrico Sereni in 1932 on the axons in the mantle connectives and stellar nerves of octopus. This led him to further studies at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory of some structures in the mantles of squid that he tentatively identified as giant nerve fibres (Young, 1936). In the summer of 1936 he visited Woods Hole in Massachusetts, determined to prove that these `curious structures' were in fact motor axons. With F. O. Schmitt and R. Bear, he successfully examined the axoplasm of axons from the mantle of the squid Loligo pealii with polarized light, but failed in attempts with Ralph Gerard, Detlev Bronk and Keffer Hartline to make any oscilloscope recordings of action potentials from single fibres. However, he and Hartline did better one day...
