PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—SECTION J. 155 
where the nutrition has become impaired, as in melancholia, 
there may be depressing ideas of self-depreciation. Then in 
other cases of faulty development of the other divisions, the 
functioning of this central third becomes disproportioned, and 
an egotistical state is produced, because it is not duly inhibited 
or controlled by those parts more especially having to do 
with the harmonising of the ego and the non-ego. In other 
words, the regulation of conduct. This may sometimes be seen 
in certain idiots with high cylindrical heads. At the same period 
of growth fibres become organised in a small portion of the 
posterior third, whose function appears to be connected with 
psychical visual conceptions. Stimulation of this area with 
a feeble current of electricity puts in motion the muscles having 
to do with sight. Very shortly after these developments, fibres 
in connection with the psychical conceptions of hearing and 
smell are organised near the already developed areas connected 
with the face and the power of articulate expression. Accord- 
ing to Flechsig there are first organised these three important 
sensory areas having to do with future mentalisation, namely, 
the sphere of bodily sensibility, the sphere of visual sensibility, 
and the sphere of auditory sensibility. Between these are placed 
what he calls association areas, three in number, one in front, 
one behind, and one at the base. These association areas are 
the last to be organised, and although their fundamental cells 
and larger fibres are to = seen in early life, the finer connec- 
tions on which consecutive mentalisation depends may not be all 
formed until the capacity for learning comes to an end. As 
Michael Foster expresses it: “ Cores, so to speak, of medullated 
fibres make their apparance, each surrounded by a zone in which 
myelination takes place more tardily. This we may inter- 
pret as meaning that certain main connections between the cells 
in a special part of the cortex and distant structures are laid 
down first, and subsidiary connections established later; and it 
is open for us to suppose that these subsidiary connections are 
especially influenced by what we call education.” Cases of 
disease give some striking examples of how what has been 
learned may become destroyed or lost. It has been mentioned 
that different portions of the cortex have to do with the psychical 
conceptions of sight, or hearing, or speech. There appear also 
to be connections that have to do with the association of, say, 
sight with speech, or of hearing with speech, and these we have 
eradually acquired. Upon disease affecting these connections 
certain forms of aphasia, or loss of memory, are developed, 
which, instead of being total, may be only partial, that is, there 
may be only “ word-blindness” or “ word-deafness.” ‘ The indi- 
vidual can see or can hear, and can speak; but the association 
mechanism connecting the shown or the heard word, and the 
speaking of it, and this alone, has broken down.” 
