OF THE NERVE CURRENT. I2 y 



the phenomena familiar to us may be explained upon this 

 view. Some physiologists have sought to account for the 

 wonderful phenomena of the nervous system by supposing 

 that some force or power of a peculiar and exceptional kind 

 is at work, and it seems scarcely to have occurred to them, 

 if ordinary force, as electricity, be made to travel in different 

 directions, and the currents combined in various ways and 

 made to traverse series of conducting cords very specially 

 arranged, according to design, the phenomena may be 

 accounted for without resorting to the hypothesis of the 

 existence of a peculiar mode or form of force not yet dis- 

 covered.* And it is more probable that the various effects 

 are determined by alterations in the intensity of the current, 

 and in the conducting properties of the fibres than by 

 different kinds of nerve force. It is surely more in accordance 

 with reason to endeavour to explain the phenomena by the 

 action of forces we know something about, than to attribute 

 them to the influence of other forms or modes of force 

 which are purely fanciful and fictitious. At any rate it 

 will be time to call in the aid of such airy nothings when 

 all attempts to explain the facts by known forces shall have 

 failed. No one has yet succeeded in rendering it probable 

 that the nerve current is not electricity while a great number 



* Physicists and chemists see no difficulty whatever in assuming the 

 existence of many modes of force of which they can form no conception, 

 and think it very satisfactory to refer phenomena which they cannot 

 understand to some at present undiscovered form or mode of ordinary 

 motion but if any one attributes these same phenomena to the influence 

 of some equally undiscovered form of force having no connexion what- 

 ever with primary energy or motion, he is ridiculed, because, say the 

 physicists and chemists, " there is but one force in kosmos !" 



