596 Dr. B. W. Richardson [April 29, 



droop, and the limbs fail, and all except tlie vital involuntary 

 movements of the heart and breathing muscles sink into rest for 

 vital repair of their own structure, whilst the central battery, to use 

 a simile as distinct from au identity, recruits itself. In this 

 " twinkling of oblivion," the sentinels, the senses of sight, hearing, 

 Bmell, taste, touch, common sensibility, which through their nervous 

 cords pulsate the impressions they receive to their centres, more or 

 less cease to vibrate. The eyes close first, for if they did not, sleep 

 would be well-nigh as impossible as it is in the fish, which never seems 

 to sleep ; the ear reposes less readily, for if it did not, we should be 

 exposed to many dangers we are aroused from by noise ; the sense of 

 odour, having its origin in the open nasal cavity, never closes, a fact 

 which accounts for odours having so powerful an influence in dreams ; 

 the sense of taste closes ; that of touch, situated in the finger tips, is 

 in abeyance, but the common sensibility from the nervous expanse 

 of the skin and mucous membranes is ever imperfectly closed, a fact 

 which accounts for pressure and movement causing dreams or actual 

 awakenin^zs to full life. Thus between the outer world and the great 

 centres of thought and feeling there are vibrations even in sleep, and 

 when these reach their central points there is wakefulness, activity 

 there, and that imperfect argument which we call dream, in which 

 some centres are more or less active and some more or less absolutely 

 passive, as if, for the time, dead. 



These explanations of communication betwixt the outer and inner 

 world of man account for the objective dream ; but there are other com- 

 munications, more personal if I may so express myself, which deserve 

 to be considered. We have two nervous systems : one our own, by 

 which we will and do ; the other nature's, which goes on with our 

 vital work whether we will or no. When we lay open the nervous 

 casket, we see, as now on the screen, two brains, cerebrum and 

 cerebellum, with their sjDinal cord and nerves communicating with 

 sensitive surfaces and with muscles, all under our own rule and 

 governance. But there is the other system, belonging to nature, 

 centred within the trunk of the body, not in the closed box of the skull 

 and spinal column, but in the line of the great viscera, to which its 

 nerves are distributed, and in which it communicates with the nerves of 

 the cerebral system, which are our own. In this second system lies 

 the governance of the heart, of the digestive organs, of the breathing 

 organs, to a considerable extent, and of the great secreting glands. 

 How extensive this second nervous distribution is can only be under- 

 stood when it is fully laid out before us in dissection, or in this 

 faithful picture before us. In one set of organs alone, those con- 

 cerned in digestion, such a view conveys, at a glance, the richness of 

 the supply of these involuntary nerves. Strangely also, these organic 

 nerves combine with a nerve that wanders down to them from the 

 cerebrum itself. Yesalius, the first great anatomist, traced this 

 wandering nerve, or par vagum, and depicted it, not knowing of the 

 organic nerves with which it comes into communion. Dissected out. 



