178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tween faculty and trustees there ought to be perfect concert of action; 

 when either body distrusts the other, mischief is sure to happen. The 

 method by which teachers are appointed should be a matter of usage 

 and policy, not of prescribed rule ; and the method above laid down 

 seems to be the safest in the long run. A faculty can not maintain 

 the highest efficiency unless it is thoroughly harmonious ; any jar or 

 friction in it leads to dissatisfactions which quickly spread to the stu- 

 dents, and the result is disastrous to all the parties concerned. 



-*- 



SIR CHARLES BELL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPERI- 

 MENTATION. 



By Dr. WILLIAM B. CAEPENTEE. 



IT has been repeatedly urged, by the opponents of physiological 

 experimentation, that Sir Charles Bell in his later life declared 

 that his physiological discoveries had been really made by anatomy 

 only, and that he had only made experiments for the satisfaction of 

 others ; and a quotation to this effect has been lately brought promi- 

 nently forward by Mrs. Dr. A. Kingsford, in order to set in the most 

 unfavorable light what she characterizes as the needless, fruitless, and 

 barbarous experiments of Magendie on the same subject. 



As it is probable that the vivisection question will be again 

 brought before Parliament, I think it important that the public should 

 be informed of the real history of the discoveries with which Sir 

 Charles Bell is commonly credited ; that history having been most 

 erroneously narrated by his brother-in-law, Mr. A. Shaw * (who may 

 be presumed to have written with Bell's sanction and authority), and 

 its errors, though fully exposed at the timef (during Bell's life), hav- 

 ing been repeated and even exaggerated by the most recent of his 

 biographers. J 



The great discovery ordinarily attributed to Sir Charles Bell is 

 that of the distinctness of the motor and sensory nerve-fibers ; as 

 shown by the separate existence of motor and sensory endowments, 

 (1) in the anterior and posterior roots of the spinal nerves, in whose 

 trunks these two orders of fibers are bound up together ; and (2) in 

 certain nerves of the head, some of which are motor only, while others 

 are sensory only. These doctrines, according to Mr. A. Shaw, had 

 been conceived as far back as 1809 ; and were then embodied in a 

 tract which Bell printed for private distribution among his friends,* 



* " Narrative of the Discoveries of Sir Charles Bell in the Nervous System " (1839). 

 f " British and Foreign Medical Review," January, 1840. 



% " Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. iii (1875). 



* Sir Charles Bell himself fixed the date as 1811. 



