NERVOUS FUNCTIONS. Gl 1 



comotive organs, by which they are informed of 

 what is going on. And so of feeling, taste, or 

 odour, all of which are specifically different sen- 

 sations, that are modified in a vast variety of 

 ways, by the particles of material bodies acting 

 on the nerves of feeling, taste, and smell. But 

 how is it possible that any set of nerves could 

 transmit these different sensations, if not endowed 

 with sensibility ? And if such were proved to be 

 the case, I should still maintain, that unless duly 

 supplied with arterial blood, they could be neither 

 sensitive nor motory. 



In regard to the office of the spinal marrow, a 

 new theory has been proposed by Dr. Marshal 

 Hall, who admits with other physiologists, that 

 the brain and its nerves are for the purpose of 

 endowing animals with sensation, perception, 

 judgment, memory, and volition; but maintains 

 that in the functions of the true spinal marrow, 

 there is no sensation, no consciousness, nothing psy- 

 chical: that it presides over respiration, degluti- 

 tion, nutrition, reproduction, and the action of the 

 sphincters, that it gives tone to the muscular 

 system, and is the seat of all convulsive diseases, 

 and yet that it is, in a peculiar sense, the seat 

 of the appetites and passions.* (Memoirs on the 



* But in the Lancet of November 21, 1840, he informs us, 

 that " life results from the pressure of arterial blood within the 

 vascular structure of the different organs ; or that life, in a word, 

 is arterial blood." 



