388 NATURAL SCIENCE [December 
Haemorrhages, commotions and circulatory disturbances; changes 
in the density and chemical composition of the blood, in the 
fecundating principle of the nerve which excites and awakes it 
just as the nitric or chromic acid set the mercury trembling; bile, 
that is a great excito-motor ; inanition, inertia and fatigue ; all that 
alters the compass of the vaso-motory systems or the nutrition of 
the neuroglia or of the neuroplasma may conduct to idiotism or 
frenzy. 
There is a rise and fall also, an immense waste of nervous com- 
plications resulting from a small, simple, mechanical event. Now, 
when any shapeless, primordial masses of neuroplasma are for ever 
vibrating and dividing themselves, be it by work, by exalted excita- 
tions of the sensorial impressions, by innumerable congestions, or by 
hunger, love, strife, meditation, millions of small, light, plastic, mov- 
able cells issue, that are incessantly articulating and dislocating 
themselves. Intellectual perfection could otherwise not be con- 
ceived. Broca observed that when the faculty of speech was lost by 
alterations of the frontal centre, it could be gradually recovered by a 
development of the opposite hemisphere. In short, the evolution 
of which the encephalon of man and animals is susceptible by means 
of education, demonstrates that the systems and divisions of nervous 
elements are not invariable, but perfectible and variable, and that 
the neuroplasm keeps for a longer or lesser time the shapes ac- 
quired, according to the degree of its density and vigour, several 
circumstances, such as age, vivacity of first impressions or vibrations, 
its repetition, and so forth, being at all times prevailing. 
Physiologists evince an inveterate electro-mania in their exer- 
tions to explain everything by the action of electricity, taking the 
negative variation together with the fact of the existence of electric 
fishes as a principle. Well, notwithstanding the minute investi- 
gations of Du Bois Reymond and others, they have never been 
able to explain anything by such means, not even the influence of 
compression upon the nerve, or the muscle’s vibration. Besides, 
Marey and Moreau have demonstrated that the electrical apparatus 
of the Zorpedo works as a muscle and has almost muscular jerks ; 
second, that the nerves with which it communicates do not carry the 
electricity to this queer machine, having only the faculty to set it to 
work. Moreau proves that when the prisms are treated with various 
reagents the discharges are not modified, but that they come to a 
stop when the former coagulate the albuminoid bodies, that is, soon 
after the physical conditions of the phenomena are modified. I 
suspect that nervous vibration has a mechanical action there, and 
that electricity unfolds itself on account of some rubbing or vibrations 
in the separating partitions of the 100,000 or 200,000 close-packed 
prisms. Becquerel says it is enough to press a disc of cork on 
