FUNCTIONS OF MOTOR AND SENSORY NERVES 93 



for which Bell acknowledges himself as indebted to a pupil 

 (A. Shaw). 



The edition of 1836 contains two Phil. Trans, papers of 

 1834 and 1835 an d an Additional Appendix which includes a 

 Phil. Trans, paper of 1832 ("On the Organs of the Human 

 Voice "). Three short papers on the nerves of the encephalon 

 as distinguished from those arising from the spinal marrow 

 (from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1838) 

 and a Plate XVI. are added to the 1844 third edition, which 

 otherwise is identical with the third edition of 1836. None of 

 these additions of 1836 and 1844 contains any matter bearing 

 upon the present subject. The historical note by Shaw is of 

 no value. 



Belts First Paper, 1821 



Of Bell's six papers, the first, in 1821, dealing with the nerves 

 of the face, is the most important, intrinsically as to its contents, 

 extrinsically as to its relation to his other writings. The sixth, 

 being his second paper on the nerves of the face, is of entirely 

 extrinsic value ; intrinsically it contains nothing new belonging 

 to Bell ; it merely incorporates new information derived from 

 the publications of Magendie and of Mayo. 



The reception of Bell's first paper, as may be gathered from 

 his letters, was the source of considerable satisfaction to its 

 author. He says of this paper in a letter to his brother of 

 November 1821 that "It gives me a power of doing what I 

 choose now, and will hereafter put me beside Harvey," and a 

 little later, 1 in June 1822: "My discoveries have made more 

 impression in France than here." 



This was perfectly true. Magendie, as was his custom 

 towards every physiologist whose work had appeared to him to 

 be of value, published in the first and second volumes of his 

 Journal de Physiologie (vol. i. p. 384, vol. ii. pp. 66, 363) an 

 account by John Shaw of Bell's work on the fifth nerve and 

 a translation of the experimental portion of Bell's actual paper. 

 This was assuredly a handsome proceeding on the part of 

 Magendie, which Bell accepted as a special tribute to his own 

 merits but which Magendie paid at the same time to many other 

 authors — to Broughton (vol. i. p. 120), to Rolando (vol. iii. 



1 Letters, p. 272. 



