388 NATURAL SCIENCE [December 



Haemorrhages, commotions and circulatory disturbances ; changes 

 in the density and chemical composition of the blood, in the 

 fecundating principle of the nerve which excites and awakes it 

 just as the nitric or chromic acid set the mercury trembling; bile, 

 that is a great excito-motor ; inanition, inertia and fatigue ; all that 

 alters the compass of the vaso-motory systems or the nutrition of 

 the neuroglia or of the neuroplasma may conduct to idiotism or 

 frenzy. 



There is a rise and fall also, an immense waste of nervous com- 

 plications resulting from a small, simple, mechanical event. Now, 

 when any shapeless, primordial masses of neuroplasma are for ever 

 vibrating and dividing themselves, be it by work, by exalted excita- 

 tions of the sensorial impressions, by innumerable congestions, or by 

 hunger, love, strife, meditation, millions of small, light, plastic, mov- 

 able cells issue, that are incessantly articulating and dislocating 

 themselves. Intellectual perfection could otherwise not be con- 

 ceived. Broca observed that when the faculty of speech was lost by 

 alterations of the frontal centre, it could be gradually recovered by a 

 development of the opposite hemisphere. In short, the evolution 

 of which the encephalon of man and animals is susceptible by means 

 of education, demonstrates that the systems and divisions of nervous 

 elements are not invariable, but perfectible and variable, and that 

 the neuroplasm keeps for a longer or lesser time the shapes ac- 

 quired, according to the degree of its density and vigour, several 

 circumstances, such as age, vivacity of first impressions or vibrations, 

 its repetition, and so forth, being at all times prevailing. 



Physiologists evince an inveterate electro-mania in their exer- 

 tions to explain everything by the action of electricity, taking the 

 negative variation together with the fact of the existence of electric 

 fishes as a principle. Well, notwithstanding the minute investi- 

 gations of Du Bois Eeymond and others, they have never been 

 able to explain anything by such means, not even the influence of 

 compression upon the nerve, or the muscle's vibration. Besides, 

 Marey and Moreau have demonstrated that the electrical apparatus 

 of the Torpedo works as a muscle and has almost muscular jerks ; 

 second, that the nerves with which it communicates do not carry the 

 electricity to this queer machine, having only the faculty to set it to 

 work. Moreau proves that when the prisms are treated with various 

 reagents the discharges are not modified, but that they come to a 

 stop when the former coagulate the albuminoid bodies, that is, soon 

 after the physical conditions of the phenomena are modified. I 

 suspect that nervous vibration has a mechanical action there, and 

 that electricity unfolds itself on account of some rubbing or vibrations 

 in the separating partitions of the 100,000 or 200,000 close-packed 

 prisms. Becquerel says it is enough to press a disc of cork on 



