JOTTINGS FROM RECENT NEUROLOGICAL 



PROGRESS. 



WHEN viewed across a sufficient interval of years the 

 chief advance in the neurological knowledge of the 

 century with whose last decade we now move will likely 

 enough be held to lie among facts that find but scanty place 

 in the physiological annals of the time. If by hypnosis we 

 understand all that is really true in the domain of mesmer- 

 ism, animal magnetism, and the like, few discoveries in 

 neuro-physiology can take rank beside the revelation 

 of the power of " suggestion ' : and of the manifesta- 

 tions obtainable from the nervous system by direct or 

 indirect play on its " suggestibility ". Through these 

 loom nearer the approaches to a vantage-ground whence 

 may be possible a less cramped survey of those reser- 

 voirs and channels, which, to adopt a metaphor from 

 Hughlings Jackson, occupy the highest altitudes of nervous 

 conformation. 



In other fields of neurology, where science starting 

 earlier has fared further, a soil less virgin bears a growth 

 less rapid, if at the same time less rank. The harvest 

 yields at least abundant seed for present sowing. Physio- 

 logical research is not of nature finite in the sense of ever 

 reaching a true end. There are chosen by the workers 

 more or less arbitrary halting-places ; from these, in glanc- 

 ing back at the thing done, they see most clearly the 

 manifold next to do. A "completed" research, unlike the 

 just read novel, begets desire to take it up again. The 

 record, even if not nutrient, is stimulant ; but the re- 

 cently "completed" researches, to inadequate consideration 

 of which the following few pages are given, can well lay 

 claim to both the attributes. 



Just prior to the discovery by Fritsch and Hitzig of an 

 excito-motor region in the cortex of the brain Goltz had 



