x] of the Nervous System. 299 



" great numbers reigned in the writings of physiologists from 

 "all time. But all of them alike have been feeble, fleeting, 

 "and of a short life." 



Thus Haller wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century. 

 The nineteenth century has brought great gains to our know- 

 ledge of the nervous system. Charles Bell and Majendie laid 

 bare to us that fundamental distinction between sensory and 

 motor fibres which Haller failed to see. The hidden work of 

 the vaso-motor nerves, and of the other nerves which answer to 

 calls not those of the will, and which often play their parts in 

 silence without awakening consciousness, has been revealed to 

 us. The progress of physical and especially of electric science 

 has given us conceptions of how the pulses of sense and of the 

 will fly inwards and outwards along the nerve-fibres, concep- 

 tions clear and definite compared with Haller's dim gropings 

 after the nature of the nervous fluid. And above all in these 

 later years, the microscopical study, by refined methods, of 

 healthy and especially of diseased nervous structures, carried 

 out in concert with exact experiments on living animals 

 have gathered for us knowledge concerning those different 

 provinces of the brain which serve the different functions of the 

 mind — knowledge clear, definite, and founded on fact in place 

 of Haller's timorous conjectures, and have brought us within 

 measurable distance of being able to assign, not as feeble, 

 short-lived hypotheses, but as proved experimental results, to 

 sensation its seat, to memory its seat, and even to imagination 

 its seat. We have learnt much since Haller's time. But what 

 I have said of Haller justifies, I venture to think, the assertion 

 that we have gone forward so much because we have laboured 

 on Haller's lines. He expounded the nervous system in a spirit 

 which has become the modern spirit, and our progress has been 

 due to our following his example. And if he with the know- 

 ledge and the means at his command seems to us to-day often 

 to have walked haltingly or even often to have gone astray, we 

 may ask ourselves this question : Are not we, with all the know- 

 ledge and the means at our command, walking also haltingly, 

 if not more haltingly; and are we not as often, if not more 

 often, going astray ? Shall we not seem so to those who tell 



