646 THE CEREBRAL RELATIONS OF 



have supposed that impressions made on the Visual 

 Centre usually pass from it to the Auditory Word- Centre, 

 and thence through the Kinaesthetic to the Motor Centres if 

 the Sight-impressions are to be named articulately. But if 

 merely this set of commissural fibres were damaged, the 

 individual would be left with his Sight intact, and with 

 his ordinary powers of Speech intact he would simply be 

 unable to read or to name from sight, because of the block 

 between the Visual and the Auditory Centres. In this 

 particular case, however, the block seems to have been 

 only partial, since the man could still write from dictation 

 a process usually necessitating the passage of stimuli 

 from the Auditory to the Visual Word- Centres, before the 

 excitation of those parts of the Kinaesthetic Word- Centres 

 concerned with Writing-movements and whence issue the 

 appropriate outgoing stimuli. 



Still it is possible that both the sets of commissural 

 fibres may have been destroyed, and that in this case of a 

 better educated man, his more familiar Writing-movements 

 may have been evoked by the passage of stimuli direct from 

 the Auditory to the Kinaesthetic Word- Centre rather than 

 by way of the Visual Centre (see p. 644). 



Dr. Broadbent interprets this case quite differently. His 

 opinion, however, as to the separate existence of a single 

 ' naming centre ' altogether apart from the Perceptive 

 Centres, is not here adopted. We have postulated in- 

 stead the existence of three ' word-centres ' as important 

 and intimately correlated parts of the more general Audi- 

 tory, Visual, and Kinaesthetic Centres.* 



* It is difficult to get evidence of the existence and special 

 activity of the last-named component of this triad, but since the 

 above was written the author has seen in Von Ziernssen's " Cyclo- 

 paedia, ' vol. xiv. p. 776, a short abstract of an exceedingly interesting 

 case (recorded by Westphal) having some relations with that above 



