372 FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, [ch. i. 



SECTION V. ANOTHER OFFICE ATTRIBUTED TO THE VENTRICLES 



OF THE BRAIN BY GALEN, IS ALSO SHOWN TO BE ERRONEOUS. 



After it had been fully decided, tliat llie animal spirits are 

 not generated in the ventricles of the brain, nor generated in 

 the brain, to be collected in the ventricles, still all believed 

 in this use of the ventricles at least, that they are cloacae, 

 and receptacles appointed to receive the effete matters which 

 flow towards the ventricles after the secretion of the spirits 

 and the nutrition of the brain. They asserted that the finer 

 portion of these excreta escape through the sutures of the 

 cranium, but that the denser portion trickle down partly 

 through the mamillary processes and cribriform bone into the 

 nostrils, partly through those peculiar ducts pointed out by 

 Galen and Vesalius, which lead from the pituitary gland through 

 the sphenoid bone to the fauces. It then became the theory 

 of the day, that these effete matters passing down continually 

 formed the mucus of the nostrils and fauces; coryza and catarrh 

 were said to be caused by these effete matters trickling down 

 more freely and in larger quantity, and that the brain in those 

 affections purged itself from humidities, which if left to ac- 

 cumulate in the ventricles, induce cold in the head, vertigo, 

 headache, epilepsy, apoplexy, &c. 



Conrad Victor Schneider, professor at Wittenberg, whom 

 Haller has praised in the highest terms,^ essayed to refute these 

 errors in the happiest manner by means of anatomy. In his 

 tract 'De Osse Cribriformi,^ he combats by dissection two 

 epidemic errors, as Haller terms them, the one which taught 

 that odoriferous particles enter the ventricles of the brain, and 

 there excite sensation ; the other, that the effete matters 

 descend from the brain through the cribriform bone ; for the 

 olfactory nerves are not hollow in man, as they are in brutes. 

 In his work ' De Catarrhis/ he fully demonstrates by anatomy, 

 that nothing could pass from the nostrils into the ventricles 

 of the brain, neither air nor fumes, because all the foramina 

 of the cribriform bone are closed, and the dura mater adheres 

 strongly everywhere to the bones and also to the cribriform 

 plate; that nothing could pass down to the fauces through 

 the infundibulum, through the pituitary gland, or through its 

 » Bibl. Anat., torn, i, p. 413. 



