GENERAL ANATOMY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 3i9 



of Berlin, on the structure of the Nervous System.* The fol- 

 lowing is a summary of his doctrines on this subject. The in- 

 strument used being; a microscope of Chevalier of Paris, aug- 

 mented in power by Pistor and Schiek, of Berlin. 



The organic structure of the Encephalon, the Spinal Cord, 

 and the Nerves, presents: 



1. A set of straight tubes, like a string of mock pearl beads, 

 and whose spheroidal enlargements are kept apart by an inter- 

 mediate canal. These nodulated tubes he calls varicose, from 

 their mechanical conformation or resemblance to varicose veins; 

 he also calls them jointed or articulated from their shape. 

 These are parallel to one another, cross occasionally, are never 

 seen to anastomose, and are like filaments: they contain a pe- 

 culiar matter, designated the Nervous fluid, (Liquor Nervosus 

 of Haller,) and are confined chiefly to the white or medullary 

 portion of the Encephalon and Spinal Marrow. They are of a 

 milky colour. 



2. A set of filamentous bodies, which are hollow or tubular, 

 of a simple cylindrical shape, that is, not having the irregular 

 surface or nodes of the preceding. They are uniform, and ge- 

 nerally larger than the nodulated, though the latter are in places 

 continued into the former. They contain a white viscid fluid, 

 to which he gives the name of Medullary, and which is less 

 transparent than the Nervous. These tubes are the one hun- 

 dred and twenty-ninth of a line thick in the middle; they are 

 elementary, are not surrounded individually by a neurileme, 



.are collected into fasciculi, which, in that slate, have a neuri- 

 leme, and these fasciculi are grouped into larger chords or nerves 

 proper. The elementary tubes, though they pass from one fas- 

 ciculus to another, do not discharge or empty into one another, 

 their anastomosis being merely one of adhesion. These cylin- 

 drical tubes exist chiefly in the nerves. 



3. A granulated matter, some of the grains of which are 

 very fine and some coarser, being disseminated through the 

 others. 



This is confined to the cineritious substance of the convolu- 



* Memoir of 1833-1836 to the Academy of Sciences of Berlin, translated by 

 David Craigie, M. D. Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ. Oct. 1837 : copied into Es- 

 says on Physiology, Phila. 1838. 



