280 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



people arc conscious of this, and often think, with great alarm, tliat 

 they are suffering from disease of the heart, when they are labor- 

 ing merely under temporary exhaustion of the brain. 



Under the influence of great cold on the brain and spinal cord, 

 the extreme effect of such active poisons as strychnine could for a 

 time be entirely suspended; raising a hope that in such diseases 

 as tetanus a new mode of treatment might be successfully tried. 



Extreme cold will prevent and even remove the rigidity of 

 death ; this condition is not due to the process of cooling, but is, 

 on the contrary, quickened by heat, and prevented by cold. By 

 taking an animal already rigid, freezing it and thawing it, the 

 first rigidity will be removed and the body become flaccid. On 

 freezing and rapidly thawing the skin of certain regions of the 

 body, birds present extreme irregularity of movement and other 

 signs of nervous disturbance ; by treating in this way the side of 

 the neck, a pigeon for a time walked sideways in the opposite 

 direction. It is a remarkable fiict that no hybernating animal has 

 a largo brain. — Med. Times and Oazette. 



CALORIC THE FORM OF FORCE IN NERVOUS MATTER. 



The experiments of Galvani and others, on the influence of elec- 

 trical action on muscular motion through nerve, led, in the early 

 part of this century, physiologists to the belief that in the natural 

 nervous system electrical force is developed, and that the nerve 

 cords from the centres are the veritable conductors of electric cur- 

 rents. This view is still maintained by many with much persist- 

 ency, and various analogies have been set up between brain force 

 and galvanism. Dr. B."W. Richardson, of England, as long ago 

 as 1860, opposed these views, maintaining that in the animal body 

 there is no arrangement for the generation or liberation of any 

 variety of force except caloric, and that this force, set free in the 

 combustion of blood, is the primary cause of motion in nature, and 

 therefore a primary cause of life, in so far as motion represents 

 life. The strength or the power of motion in animals is in exact 

 relationship to the power of the animal to eliminate and apply 

 caloric. In an anim-al at rest a certain weight of carbon is con- 

 verted into carbonic acid, and a certain proportion of water is 

 liberated ; in the animal in active motion a greater amount of 

 carbonic acid and visible vapors of water are poured out, just as 

 steam is evolved by a locomotive, as to cause and eftect. Says 

 he: "In so far, then, as motion represents life, caloric is the 

 source of living motion. It may undergo modifications in char- 

 acter; now being latent, now sensible; now being rapidly con- 

 ducted through metals, or other conducting media, now rapidly 

 evolved in series of concentrate sparks. We may call it in these 

 varied forms by other names, — electrical force, — galvanic force ; 

 but it is the alpha and omega of them all, — the principle of mo- 

 tion." 



He also inferred that the nervous system is in every part a pro- 

 ducer of the peculiar force with which it is endowed, as long as 



