102 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Bell reckons among the respiratory nerves ; he alludes to 

 muscular relaxation producible through the influence of the 

 fourth nerve and in a footnote (p. 296) describes an experiment 

 to demonstrate elongation of an extensor muscle in association 

 with the contraction of the opponent flexor muscle. The reader 

 is left in doubt as to the manner in which this experiment can 

 have been performed. In his summary at the end of this paper, 

 on p. 300, he gives for the first time a clear account of the fifth 

 nerve as the spinal nerve of the head with a double origin like 

 a spinal nerve and a double function, bestowing sensibility to 

 the head and face, to the skin, to the surfaces of the eye, to the 

 cavities of the nose, the mouth and tongue and motion to 

 the muscles of the jaws and mastication. He describes the 

 portio dura of the seventh as the motor nerve of the face and 

 eyelids and the respiratory nerve and that on which the 

 expression of the face depends ; all this, it is to be remembered, 

 occurs in the second part of the paper on the nerves of the 

 orbit of June 1823, not in the paper on the nerves of the face 

 of 1821 ; and as if to make quite sure of proving to his reader 

 that it is in consequence of Magendie's work of 1822 that Bell 

 1 82 1 has been transformed into Bell 1823 as regards the fifth 

 and seventh nerves, he concludes this second paper on the 

 nerves of the eye by saying that in a foreign review of his 

 former papers his results have been considered as a further 

 proof in favour of experiments and protests that experiments 

 have never been the means of discovery and invokes the 

 examples of our own great countrymen, the Munros and the 

 Hunters as distinguished from the physiologists of France 

 who borrow from us and follow up our opinions by experi- 

 ments ; in a footnote he clenches the case against himself 

 by saying " see the experiments of Monsieur Magendie on 

 the distinction between the roots of the spinal nerves " 

 (P. 307). 



Bells fifth paper, on the" Nervous Circuit" was published in 

 1826, when the distinction between motor and sensory fibres, 

 established by Magendie, had become common property and it 

 had been made clear that the fifth nerve was mainly sensory, the 

 seventh nerve mainly motor. He had previously described the 

 fifth as distributed to muscles as well as to the skin in the belief 

 that it was a sensory-and-motor nerve. And he evidently felt 



