LIFE AND ORGANISATION. 95 



observation, that not a single anatomist or philosopher of 

 antiquity placed a right interpretation on its nature and 

 uses, Modern science has encountered the subject with the 

 better appliances of experimental enquiry ; and though much 

 remains to be done, and much more may be deemed wholly 

 unattainable, yet we can safely affirm that some of its greatest 

 achievements are to be found in the anatomy and physiology 

 of the nervous system. 



Into the details of these discoveries we cannot enter. 

 They relate chiefly to that organisation and distribution of 

 nervous matter (including the Brain as its highest develope- 

 ment) through which this power is generated and transmitted 

 in fulfillment of the various functions of life. They include 

 yet further the especial relation between the several parts of 

 the nervous system and their different functions ; whether 

 such as appertain to animal life appropriately, or those more 

 purely of organic kind. This latter distinction in itself may 

 be deemed a recent discovery, and one prolific in curious 

 and instructive results. So, in truth, are all those discoveries 

 which connect particular parts of the nervous system with 

 the offices they fulfill ; from the highest and most complex 

 forms of this structure in man, to the bare manifestation of 

 it in the lowest grades of animal life. Every step in these 

 researches opens out new views to the speculative eye, and 

 offers new problems for experiment and reason to resolve. 

 The successive and successful labours of Bichat, Bell, Ma- 

 gendie, Marshall Hall, and other physiologists, thus directed, 

 have been more recently extended by those of Brown Sequard, 

 to whom we owe many interesting facts in this part of animal 

 physiology. 



Among these various topics, there is one question so closely 

 allied to some we have been discussing, that it cannot fitly 

 be put aside. Is there any special physical agent, acting in 

 and through the nervous system, and by such action giving 



