330 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
or the hopeless incredulity which had abandoned the matter in de- 
spair: thus stimulating and justifying fresh exertions in the flagg- 
ing or disappointed enthusiast. But it is to us more than question- 
able whether all the enquiries of the physiologist can be answered 
in any time; for they trench on ground in its very nature forbid- 
den to mortal access, and involve the enquirer in bewildering spe- 
culations, from which the mind recoils, stunned with awe and 
amazement, but unillumined by a single additional ray of know- 
ledge. Here is the prime question in physiology—What is life ? 
The boundary line dividing science from the knowledge of himself, 
denied to man by his Creator, it is not easy to perceive ; for physio- 
logy, if pushed far, and then not out of its track, soon merges in 
psychology, after which we speedily come to a punctum stans. It 
is not here the object to discourage cultivation, nor to depreciate 
the valuable and interesting additions which genius, from time to 
time, has added to our physical knowledge of ourselves—far from 
it ; but, with regret, we add that desert has greatly exceeded disco- 
very. Our embarrassment increases when we come to find that the 
most distinguished physiologists differ widely from each other in 
some essential matters, where “both cannot be right ;” yet both 
are plausible, and each has numerous followers, who hold, like good 
disciples, fast by the faith of their respective masters. It is fortu- 
nate for humanity that, with such diverse doctrines in physiology, 
there is no corresponding variety—to the same extent—in the ap- 
plication of its laws in the cure or treatment of disease, with which, 
indeed, it interferes less than it might be presumed to do, consider- 
ing the estimation in which it is held by the scientific physician. 
An example of the “‘ pisPpaRATus” in physiology may be made — 
tolerably intelligible to lay readers thus: those laws called physical 
which govern inorganic matter, and which now, by the extension of 
knowledge, are familiar to most men of even limited education, are 
by some philosophers contended to be identically the same with the 
laws which regulate living organic matter. While, on the other 
side, it is insisted That the functions of organs are performed in obe- 
dience to special laws, which they call physiological or vital, and 
sound. The author of the experiment forgot, as did his disciples, that the 
portion of a divided nerve which is separated fiom the brain is capable ot 
resuming its function for a short season when stimulated—for which purpose 
it is not shown that the galvanic fluid is exclusively required, nor that, as in 
other nerves, ordinary stimuli as well as special, will not produce the effect. 
Also, the galvanometer failed invariably to prove the evolution of the gal- 
vanie fluid by means of the nerves, as conductors or generators. And a 
most conclusive disproof of the non-identity of those fluids (nervous and gal- 
vanic) would seem to be that, if the fluids are the same, there should not be 
the following dissimilarity: if a tight ligature be placed on a nerve in the 
living animal, the nerve no longer acts as a conductor of the nervous fluid : 
now, if the same proceeding be adopted again, the nerve, despite its ligature — 
(which in the first case, prevented the transmission of the nervous fluid), 
perfectly well as before the application, serves as a conductor, and transmits 
the shock, galvanic or electric. 
a 
