352 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



which, although not painful in themselves, may easily 

 pass into pain. Finally, we have a specific form of 

 Sensibility capable of being excited by a great variety 

 of stimuH in great variety of degrees : and this is Pain ; 

 which appears to exist in all the higher animals, though 

 in a feebler degree than in man. Even among men the 

 difi'erence of susceptibility is very remarkable. It is 

 much less in savages than in highly- civilised men, as it 

 seems also to be less in wild animals than in domesti- 

 cated, especially petted, animals ; less in men leading 

 an active out-of-door life than in those leading a 

 sedentary intellectual life ; less in women than in men ; 

 less in persons of lymphatic than in persons of nervous 

 temperaments. To one man the scratch which is a 

 trifle scarcely noticed, is to another an obtrusive pain ; 

 the one will not even tie his handkerchief over the 

 wound, so little does it press upon his sensibihty ; the 

 other is pale, and must have the wound dressed. 



It is because men habitually confound Sensibility 

 with Pain — the general with the j^articular — that so 

 many disputes continue respecting the sensibility of 

 certain parts of the nervous mechanism ; for instance, 

 the disputes as to whether the Sympathetic system is 

 also a Sensitive system. But no correct understanding 

 of the nervous system can be arrived at until more 

 rigorous language is adopted, and we learn to designate 

 all nerve-actions by the one general property of Sensi- 

 bility, and to discriminate between this general pro- 

 perty and its special manifestations. Pain is, I believe, 

 a special form of this general Sensibility ; and although 



