FURTHER VERIFICATION OF FUNCTIONAL SIZE 
CHANGES IN NERVE CELL BODIES BY THE 
USE OF THE POLAR PLANIMETER 
DAVID H. DOLLEY 
From the Pathological Laboratory of the University of Missouri 
THREE FIGURES 
INTRODUCTION 
Kocher (‘16) has recently published several papers which 
make a sweeping denial of any morphological evidence of func- 
tional activity in the nerve cell body. He bases this conclusion 
chiefly on his failure to find constant differences in the average 
size of cells between exercised and undisturbed animals by the 
use of the polar planimeter. It became necessary, therefore, for 
the writer to test his own positive finding of functional changes 
by this method. 
The writer has, indeed, used the polar planimeter extensively 
to determine the areas of constituent sections of individual cells 
in one micron series. This gave part of the data necessary in 
calculating individual cell volumes by the prismoid formulas. 
Some of these results are published (‘14), some are not. It did 
not appear then, on objective as well as theoretical grounds, that 
the method by itself would add any essential information re- 
garding the functional reaction that was not already supplied 
from average of diameter measurements. This the present re- 
sults confirm. 
It is further my more personal task to reply because the crit- 
icism of Kocher is directed entirely at myself, and patently aims 
to discredit methods, technic, and conclusions. One only finds 
advantage in a censoriousness which overshoots the mark, but I 
deprecate being singled out from the large company of workers 
who have been convinced that there are morphological evidences 
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