44 Dr. Philip on the Secreting Power of Animals. 



too much for Dr. Alison's purpose. He admits that the function 

 of respiration necessarily implies the presence of the sensorial 

 power (p. 279), so that in some of the monsters to which he 

 refers sensorial power existed, although there was nothing 

 which deserved the name of either brain or spinal marrow. 

 Here it is evident that there was some part substituted for those 

 organs capable of the sensorial function. But who would infer 

 from such cases, that the sensorial function in the perfect animal 

 has no dependence on the brain and spinal marrow. Now Dr. 

 Alison forgets, that the nervous power is as essential to respira- 

 tion as the sensorial. These monsters, therefore, possessed the 

 nervous as well as sensorial power, howsoever unusual in appear- 

 ance or situation might be the organs on which they depended. 

 Thus all argument against the nervous power being necessary to 

 secretion, derived from such cases, is silenced. It is evident, 

 that in them both sensorial and nervous power existed, and conse- 

 quently that some part performed the functions of brain and 

 spinal marrow. 



Dr. Alison, forgetting the cases in which respiration was per- 

 formed without either brain or spinal marrow, of which he gives 

 a detail in the following page, observes in page 279, in com- 

 menting on the case detailed by Mr. Laurence : " As this child 

 had breathed, I agree most fully with Dr. Philip's conclusion, 

 that it must have performed certain mental acts, and, in deliver- 

 ing lectures on Physiology, I have quoted this fact along with 

 others, as proving, that the mental acts concerned in respiration 

 are not necessarily connected with more than a very small portion 

 of the base of the brain, probably of the medula oblongata ; 

 perhaps not even with that." Let Dr. Alison consider how much 

 these observations must be modified when he takes into the 

 account the cases which he gives us in the next page. Let him 

 also consider to what conclusions his mode of reasoning leads. 

 He ought, for example, on the same principle to teach, that in 

 the perfect animal the nerves of the intercostal muscles and 

 diaphragm are independent of the spinal marrow, because, in 

 the cases here referred to, these muscles were excited by the will 

 where no spinal marrow existed. 



