ii ANIMAL LIFE 131 



seems as though the rest of the body had sustained 

 the nervous system to the last extremity, treating itself 

 simply as the means of which the nervous system 

 is the end. 



To sum up : if we agree, in short, to understand by 

 &quot; the sensori-motor system &quot; the cerebro-spinal nervous 

 system together with the sensorial apparatus in which it 

 is prolonged and the locomotor muscles it controls, 

 we may say that a higher organism is essentially a 

 sensori-motor system installed on systems of digestion, 

 respiration, circulation, secretion, etc., whose function 

 it is to repair, cleanse and protect it, to create an 

 unvarying internal environment for it, and above all 

 to pass it potential energy to convert into locomotive 

 movement. 1 It is true that the more the nervous 

 function is perfected, the more must the functions 

 required to maintain it develop, and the more exacting, 

 consequently, they become for themselves. As the 

 nervous activity has emerged from the protoplasmic 

 mass in which it was almost drowned, it has had to 

 summon around itself activities of all kinds for its 

 support. These could only be developed on other 



I insomnie absolue&quot; (Arch. ital. de biologie, t. xxi., 1894, pp. 322 ff.). Recently, 

 analogous observations have been made on a man who died of inanition 

 after a fast of thirty-five days. See, on this subject, in the Annte biologique 

 of 1898, p. 338, the resume of an article (in Russian) by Tarakevitch and 

 Stchasny. 



1 Cuvier said : &quot; The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole animal ; 

 the other systems are there only to serve it.&quot; (&quot; Sur un nouveau rapproche 

 ment a etablir entre les classes qui composent le regne animal,&quot; Arch, du 

 Museum d histoire naturelle, Paris, 1812, pp. 73-84). Of course, it would 

 be necessary to apply a great many restrictions to this formula for example, 

 to allow for the cases of degradation and retrogression in which the nervous 

 system passes into the background. And, moreover, with the nervous 

 system must be included the sensorial apparatus on the one hand and 

 the motor on the other, between which it acts as intermediary. Cf. 

 Foster, art. &quot;Physiology,&quot; in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edinburgh, 1885, 

 p. 17. 



