ON NEURAL EXCRETION 77 



aspect of the systemic nervous system, seems to us to fall, 

 or to operate with the most deadly effect, on the textures 

 innervated by the sympathetic system, amid which the 

 systemic terminal nervature is distributed, destroying, it 

 may be, their vitality, and leading to solutions of their 

 continuity, in proportion to the continuance and intensity 

 of the discharge. These solutions of continuity may vary 

 in extent from the merely molecular and minute to the 

 somatic and general, and may be sudden or prolonged in 

 regard to the time occupied in their production, and 

 temporary or permanent in their destructive results, ac- 

 cording to the completeness of the textural destruction 

 effected. Thus a herpes zoster may be of such a slight 

 and ephemeral character as scarcely to be noticeable, or so 

 severe as completely to incapacitate its subject, entail great 

 suffering, and the destruction of more or less of the skin 

 and subcutaneous tissues involved in the herpetic process. 

 The destruction here indicated is "on all fours" with that 

 effected by "rodent ulceration" wherever existent, and 

 seems to us to depend on molecular or somatic death of the 

 involved tissue elements by the lethal discharge of nerve 

 energy from the peripheral extremities of the systemic 

 afferent nervature into the sympathetically as well as the 

 neighbouring systemically innervated tissues ; hence the 

 microscopic appearances of the resultant tissue debris must 

 depend on the nature and texture of the tissue under- 

 going destruction, and the character of the particular 

 microbic organism which may have gained access to the 

 scene of destruction, and whose function for the time 

 being may be that of scavenger and innocent assister in 

 the performance of organic hygiene, phagocytosis not being 

 here necessary, the removal of molecular debris, the result 

 of neurolysis, being the pressing desideratum, and the 

 raison d'etre of their presence. 



Viewed from this point, "rodent ulceration" is usually 

 confined to a particular nerve or nerve fibre terminal 

 arborisation, and manifests itself, as its histological posi- 

 tion necessitates, in the involved arborisation, thence 

 spreading, it may be, horizontally or laterally to neigh- 

 bouring arborisations of the same nerve trunk, branch, 

 or fibre, and perpendicularly, or at right angles, along the 



