THE LOWER BRAIN. 



487 



attribute the most important role in the greater emotional 

 expressions, laughing and weeping, cries of pain: in a word, 

 involuntary manifestations." That the structures such as 

 those penetrated by the current should be suddenly jarred and 

 forcibly thrown into vibratory conditions entirely foreign to 

 their normal vibratory rhythm is manifest. That such jarring, 

 especially when the current follows axially a direction opposite 

 to that of a physiological stream of impulses, should so per- 

 vert its normal influence upon the organs to which these im- 

 pulses are normally distributed heart, lungs, stomach, etc. 

 as to temporarily or permanently arrest their functions is not 

 only logical, but in accord with the known effects of electricity 

 upon the more highly developed structures. 



And we can also doubtless better understand why respira- 

 tion still continues very much as usual after removal of the 

 brain above the medulla, and why, indeed, all nervous mani- 

 festations other than ideation can persist after such mutilation. 

 While there is no "nceud vital" or ganglion of life, in the sense 

 given these words by Flourens, i.e., in the spot of the medulla 

 where injury arrests respiration, and the area so injured is 

 not "the mysterious seat of the unknown principle of life," 

 there is, nevertheless, in this location, not a locus minus 

 resistentice, but an aggregation of nervous paths from all di- 

 rections, which an injury can functionally impair or destroy, 

 according to the quantity of tissue involved and the kind of 

 lesion produced. Flourens doubtless caused death; but in 

 looking for death in his experimental animals he doubtless did 

 not treat the "nceud vital" with the gentleness of a dove. 

 Death ensued the result of conditions similar to those pro- 

 duced by the Weber brothers with electricity in the sense that 

 molecular disturbance was produced. Yet the Weber brothers 

 only jarred the naso-bulbar structures, and produced temporary 

 inhibition of cardiac action; being more diffuse, the current 

 spread over greater bulbar surface and did less injury. Flou- 

 rens's puncture, on the contrary, produced an organic lesion, 

 capable not only of destroying the tissues involved, but also of 

 annulling, by the circumferential compression of the neighbor- 

 ing elements caused, the functions over which the latter preside. 

 Even the process of repair, which at once begins under such 



