329 
CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
Elements of Physiology, by J. Miller, M.D. Professor of Anatomy 
and Physiology in the University of Berlin, etc. Translated from 
the German, with Notes by William Baly, M.I). Graduate of the 
University of Berlin, and Physician to the Pancras Infirmary. 
Illustrated with steel plates and numerous wood engravings. 
Part III, containing the Nervous System. 8vo, London: Tay- 
lor & Walton. 
Human Physiology, by Dr. Elliotson. 8vo, London ; Part II, 
containing the Animal Functions. 
PaysioLoey, the science of the laws which govern and regulate 
the functions of the organs of man, and the aggregation of those 
functions, called life, is by far the most arduous, although, perhaps, 
not the most obviously useful, of the medical sciences. Based on 
anatomy, and demanding the severest process of induction in reason- 
ing on the results of experiment and observation ; exercising the 
higher faculties of the mind, and demanding for its perfect intelli- 
gence the auxiliary aid of much and varied collateral knowledge, it 
has nevertheless invited and received the devotion of minds to whom, 
for the above reasons, it would not presumably be attractive ; it has 
also occupied more congenial intellects, almost to the exclusion of 
other pursuits, except such as are cognate to the master subject : 
notwithstanding which advantages, it has progressed less rapidly 
than other branches of the healing art, of more practical and more 
apparent usefulness to man. There would seem, therefore, to be dif- 
ficulties inherent in it, and not explicable on grounds which usually 
will account for the retardation of other studie# It cannot be de- 
nied that daily experience is disproving the mischievous doctrines 
which deaden enterprise by anticipating the impossibility of success. 
Even physiology itself occasionally presents an example of some 
fact being established, and superseding either an absurd hypothesis,* 
TA very notable instance of the correction of errors, as plausible as_pro- 
found, and which might be said to be exclusively in the possession of the 
learned, is the repudiation of the notion that the “active principle of the 
nerves,” is the electric or galvanic fluid. A mistake that may almost be call. 
ed gross, especially in the present state of our knowledge: yet we believe 
there has been no formal recantation; nerves being, as wet cords, good con- 
ductors of the galvanic fluid, it was inferred that conduction of the galvanic 
fluid was their proper office, and therefore that the nervous and galvanic were 
the same, the fluid being generated in other situations. This testimony (?) 
received farther confirmation from the believed fact that, when the vagus 
nerve was divided, and a galvanic current passed through the divided vagus 
to the stomach, digestion of food was performed as if the nerve had remained 
VOL. IX., NO. XXVI. 42 
