494 OTTORINO ROSSI 
The results which the English and American schools have se- 
cured by these methods are so well known that it is quite un- 
necessary to go into a detailed exposition and to assert that 
we expect great profit by their further use. Nevertheless, it 
seems to me that the study of pure anatomical preparations also 
should be able to give new contributions of value toward the 
solution of the complicated problems related to the sympathetic 
system. The researches of Miiller (3) and his coworkers who 
have employed Bielschowsky’s method and the Rongalitweiss- 
staining support my contention, which agrees also with the fol- 
lowing findings concerning the question of the sensory sym- 
pathetic paths. 
Lennander’s idea that all visceral pain was mediated through 
the parietal peritoneum or through the sensory fibers of the 
visceral blood-vessels has been disproved, we may say, definitely 
by the majority of physiologists. At the present time two other 
views are under discussion about the pathways which convey 
visceral sensibility. The one, to-day widely accepted, assumes 
that all afferent sensory fibers present in the sympathetic nerves 
are peripheral processes of neurones the cell bodies of which lie 
in the spinal ganglia. Such special dorsal root neurones are 
believed to send their processes, via rami communicantes, into 
the sympathetic trunks, where they meet with and accompany 
the efferent postganglionic fibers to their terminations in tissues. 
According to such a view, visceral sensibility would be conveyed 
in pathways similar to those of the varieties of common sensi- 
bility, at least so far as concerns the afferent impulses of visceral 
origin which appear in consciousness. That is, sympathetic 
sensory structures are denied and it is affirmed that all the sym- 
pathetic elements are of motor character. The opposing view, 
supported by Dogiel and nowadays defended by the minority of 
neurologists, recognizes in the sympathetic mechanism sensory 
neurones which belong primarily to this system. These neurones 
would have their trophic centers in the various autonomic gan- 
glia; their peripherally directed processes end in sensory terminal 
apparatuses of the viscera; their centrally directed processes 
run through the rami communicantes into the spinal ganglia 
