“DIE LOKALISATION IM GROSSHIRN”’ 505 
One reason for the neglect of Jackson’s hypothesis may be 
that Jackson’s conception is distinctly that of a physiologist, 
while clinicians generally have tried to interpret the nervous 
system without much reference to purely physiological data. 
The physiologist has generally given too little consideration to 
well established clinical data, and has often exercised too little 
critical discrimination with regard to widely current beliefs 
which were not necessarily in accordance with the facts. I 
find Jackson’s views in general better suited to constructive 
work than Goltz’s. 
The odds in favor of any hypothesis of shock and against 
cerebral localization could scarcely be greater than von Monakow 
has granted. He has understated rather than overstated his 
case. To my mind, therefore, one of the fundamental questions 
in the physiology of the nervous system, and in fact the question 
that underlies practically all of our interpretation of the effects 
of lesions of the central nervous system today, is whether or not 
a nerve cell, or group of cells, perhaps forming a potential reflex 
are, IN any way increases quantitatively, after injury to a system 
connected with it, the work which it has been doing while all its 
connections are intact. Unless the possibility of such a quanti- 
tative change can be excluded, the whole hypothesis of shock 
must be modified. And if such a quantitative change can be 
shown in such an isolated (speaking relatively, of course) group 
of nerve cells, even von Monakow’s conclusions must be modified 
in favor of a stricter view of cerebral localization than the one 
he now holds. 
If von Monakow is right in his conclusions from anatomical 
data, and, as I have insisted elswhere, they derive great support 
from the experimental data, Edinger’s dictum becomes definitely 
obsolete, and takes with it all the obscurity and vagueness of 
the shock hypothesis, as well as, let us hope, some of its acrimony. 
into the process of compensation or that impulses passing over these fibers are 
any more intense than before. There may be an increased sensitivity of some 
of the receptors, but it seems probable that the main thing is the change of re- 
sistance at the synapses. 
On the basis of the all or none law, it is difficult to see how such a severe effect 
as has sometimes been supposed to result from transection of the spinal cord is 
possible. 
THE JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY, VOL. 29, NO. 5 
