FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVE SPIRIT. 57 



though it be, is, nevertheless, the pure spirit of the human brain. 

 The materialism lies with those who make the brain solid, the skull 

 thick, and the mind an abstraction. 



VII. In conclusion, we may be allowed to say that the doctrine 

 of a nerve spirit is no new creed, nor ever was unorthodox until 

 now. The greatest names in physiology are its adherents. But 

 neither did these men see the tubes or the fluid, such as we have 

 conceived it, in the dead subject : a fact which, as Haller says, 

 " shows the weakness of the senses, but has no validity against 

 the existence of a juice or spirit in the nerves." This reason had 

 its proper effect with the great anatomists of the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries : it showed them the weakness of their senses, 

 and stimulated them the more to use their understandings. They 

 were the original geniuses who laid the foundation of a general 

 knowledge of anatomy that will not pass away, but to which' we 

 must recur when we desire to refresh our minds with the first vivid 

 impressions that the wonders of the body created upon the finest 

 intellects that ever studied organization. Would it were in our 

 power to bring before the reader the characteristics of these brave 

 pioneers of anatomical knowledge. Would we could reintroduce 

 him to the venerable Eustachius j to Malpighi, the father of vis- 

 ceral anatomy; to Ruysch and Morgagni, the purifiers of the ana- 

 tomy of the schools j to Leeuwenhoek, who first seized the micro- 

 scope as an exclusive field, and devoted himself to it for fifty years 

 with an eagerness which has not been surpassed; to Vieussens, 

 Lancisi and Baglivi, eminent alike for systematic knowledge and 

 philosophical genius ; to Bartholin, Verheyen, Heister and Wins- 

 low, whose methodical text-books kept their ground in the Euro- 

 pean schools for more than a hundred years, and who supplied their 

 successors with much of both the matter and the form that exists 

 in the manuals now in use ; to Boerhaave, " the common preceptor 

 of Europe" in the last century, and the consulting physician of the 

 world, who gathered up the experience and deductions of ages in 

 anatomy and physiology, and gave it a new and compact form in that 

 wonderful little book, the Institutiones Medicce : also to Boerhaave's 

 pupil, Haller, who stands as a mountain between the present and the 

 past, and reflects from his summit the departed learning of seventeen 



