438 



NA TURE 



[September 2, 1897 



first note was sounded long ago in the middle of the century, 

 when Claude Bernard made known what he called " the glyco- 

 genic function of the liver." Men, too, were busy with the 

 thyroid body and the suprarenal capsules long before the meeting 

 of the British Association at Montreal. But it was since then, 

 namely in 1889, that Minkowski published his discovery of the 

 diabetic phenomena resulting from the total removal of the 

 pancreas. That, I venture to think, was of momentous value, 

 not only as a valuable discovery in itself, but especially, perhaps, 

 in confirming and fixing our ideas as to internal secretion, and 

 in encouraging further research. 



Minkowski's investigation possessed this notable feature, that 

 it was clear, sharp and decided, and, moreover, the chief factor, 

 namely sugar, was subject to quantitative methods. The 

 results of removing the thyroid body had been to a large 

 extent general, often vague, and in some cases uncertain ; so 

 much so as to justify, to a certain extent, the doubts held by 

 some as to the validity of the conclusion that the symptoms 

 witnessed were really and simply due to the absence of the 

 organ removed. The observer who removes the pancreas has 

 to deal with a tangible and measurable result, the appearance of 

 sugar in the urine. About this there can be no mistake, no 

 uncertainty. And the confidence thus engendered in the con- 

 clusion that the pancreas, besides secreting the pancreatic juice, 

 effects some notable change in the blood passing through it, 

 spread to the analogous conclusions concerning the thyroid and 

 the suprarenal, and moreover suggested further experimental 

 inquiry. By those inquiries all previous doubts have been 

 removed ; it is not now a question whether or no the thyroid 

 carries on a so-called internal secretion ; the problem is reduced 

 to finding out what it exactly does and how exactly it does it. 

 Moreover, no one can at the present day suppose that this feature 

 of internal secretion is confined to the thyroid, the suprarenal, 

 and the pancreas ; it needs no spirit of prophecy to foretell that 

 the coming years will add to physiological science a large and 

 long chapter, the first marked distinctive verses of which belong 

 to the dozen years which have just passed away. 



The above three lines of advance are of themselves enough to 

 justify a certain pride on the part of the physiologist as to the 

 share which his science is taking in the forward movements of 

 the time. And yet I venture to think that each and all of these 

 is .wholly overshadowed by researches of another kind, through 

 which knowledge has made, during the past dozen years or so, 

 a bound so momentous and so far-reaching that all other 

 results gathered in during the time seem to shrink into relative 

 insignificance. 



It was a little before my period, in the year 1879, that Golgi 

 published his modest note, " Un nuovo processo di technica 

 microscopica " (" Rendiconti del reale Istituto Lombard©," 

 vol. xii. p. 206). That was the breaking out from the rocks of 

 a little stream which has since swollen into a great flood. It is 

 quite true that long before a new era in our knowledge of the 

 central nervous system had been opened up by the works 

 of Ferrier and of Fritsch and Hitzig. Between 1870 and 

 1880 progress in this branch of physiology had been con- 

 tinued and rapid. Yet that progress had left much to be 

 desired. On the one hand the experimental inquiries, even 

 when they were carried out with the safeguard of an adequate 

 psychical analysis of the phenomena which presented themselves, 

 and this was not always the case, sounded a very uncertain note, 

 at least when they dealt with other than simply motor effects. 

 They were, moreover, not unfrequently in discord with clinical 

 experience. In general the conclusions which were arrived at 

 through them, save such as were based on the production of 

 easily recognised and often measurable movements, were regarded 

 by many as conclusions of the kind which could not be ignored, 

 which demanded respectful attention, and yet which failed to 

 carry conviction. It seemed to be risking too much to trust too 

 implicitly to the apparent teaching of the results arrived at ; 

 something appeared wanting to give these their full validity, to 

 explain their full and certain meaning by showing their con- 

 nection with what was known in other ways and by other 

 methods. On the other hand, during nearly all this time, in 

 spite of the valuable results acquired by the continually improving 

 histological technique, by the degeneration method, and by the 

 developmental method, by the study of the periods of myelina- 

 tion, most of us, at all events, were sitting down, as our fore- 

 fathers had done, before the intricate maze of encephalic 

 structure, fascinated by its complexity, but wondering what it all 

 meant. Even when we attempted to thread our way through 



NO. 1453, VOL. 56] 



the relatively simple tangle of the spinal cord, to expect that we 

 should ever see our way so to unravel out the strands of fibres, 

 here thick, there thin, now twisting and turning, and anon run- 

 ning straight, or so to set out in definite constellations the seem- 

 ing milky way of star-like cells, so to do this as to make the 

 conformation of the cord explain the performances of which it is 

 capable, appeared to be something beyond our reach. And 

 when we passed from the cord to those cerebral structures the 

 even gross topography of which is the despair of the beginner in 

 anatomical studies, the multiple maze of grey and white matter 

 seemed to frame itself into the letters graven on the gateway of 

 the city of Dis, and bid us leave all hope behind. 



What a change has come upon us during the past dozen years, 

 and how great is the hope of ultimate success which we have 

 today. Into what at the meeting at Montreal seemed a cloudy 

 mass, in which most things were indistinct and doubtful, and 

 into which each man could read images of possible mechanisms 

 according as his fancy led, the method of Golgi has fallen like 

 a clarifying drop, and at the present moment we are watching 

 with interest and delight how that vague cloud is beginning to 

 clear up and develop into a sharp and definite picture, in which 

 lines objectively distinct and saying one thing only reveal them- 

 selves more and more. This is not the place to enter into 

 details, and I will content myself with pointing out as illustra- 

 tive of my theme the progress which is being made in our know- 

 ledge of how we hear and how sounds affect us. A dozen years 

 ago we possessed experimental and clinical evidence which led 

 us to believe that auditory impulses sweeping up the auditory 

 nerve became developed into auditory sensations through events 

 taking place in the temporo-sphenoidal convolution, and we had 

 some indications that as these passed upward through the lower 

 and middle brain the strioe acusticK and the lateral fillet had some 

 part to play. Beyond this we knew but little. To-day we can 

 with confidence construct a diagram which he who runs can 

 read, showing how the impulses undergoing a relay in the tuber- 

 culum acusticum and accessory nucleus pass by the strice acusticoe 

 and trapezoid fibres to the superior olive and trapezoid nucleus, 

 and onwards by the lateral fillet to the posterior corpus quadra- 

 geminum and to the cortex of the temporo-sphenoidal convo- 

 lution. And if much, very much, yet remains to be done even 

 in tracking out yet more exactly the path pursued by the im- 

 pulses while they are still undeveloped impulses, not as yet lit 

 up with consciousness, and in understanding the functional 

 meaning -of relays and apparently alternate routes, to say nothing 

 of the deeper problems of when and how the psychical element 

 intervenes, we feel that we have in our hands the clue by means 

 of which we may hope to trace out clearly the mechanisms by 

 which, whether consciousness plays its part or no, sounds affect 

 so profoundly and so diversely the movements of the body, and 

 haply some time or other to tell, in a plain and exact way, 

 the story of how we hear. I have thus referred to hearing 

 because the problems connected with this seemed, thirteen 

 years ago, so eminently obscure ; it appeared so pre-eminently 

 hard a task, that of tracing out the path of an auditory impulse 

 through the confused maze of fibre and cell presented by the 

 lower and middle brain. Of the mechanism of sight we seemed 

 even then to have better knowledge, but how much more clearly 

 do we, so to speak, see vision now? So also with all other 

 sensations, even those most obscure ones of touch and pain ; 

 indeed, all over the nervous system light seems breaking in a 

 most remarkable way. 



This great and significant progress we owe, I venture to say, 

 to Golgi, to the method introduced by him ; and I for one 

 cannot help being glad that this important contribution to 

 science, as well as another contingent and most valuable one, 

 the degeneration method of Marchi, should be among the many 

 tokens that Italy, the mother of all sciences in times gone by, 

 is now once more taking her right place in scientific no less 

 than in political life. We owe, I say, this progress to Golgi in 

 the sense that the method introduced by him was the beginning 

 of the new researches. We owe, moreover, to Golgi not the 

 mere technical introduction of the method, but something more. 

 He himself pointed out the theoretical significance of the 

 results which his method produced ; and if in this he has been 

 outstripped and even corrected by others, his original merit 

 must not be allowed to be forgotten. Those others are many, 

 in many lands ; but two names stand out conspicuous among 

 them. If rejuvenescent Italy invented the method, another 

 ancient country, whose fame, once brilliant in the past, like 

 that of Italy, suffered in later times an eclipse, produced the 



