90 ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 



Upon the different functions supposed to be performed by dif- 

 ferent parts of these, is founded the modern science of phrenology. 

 They are thought to be no further necessary to sensation and 

 voluntary motion, than as receptacles to treasure up the one, and 

 an organ to direct the other. The brain itself is not possessed of 

 sensibility, for when the skull has been fractured, and the brain has 

 protruded, part of it has been repeatedly shaved off, without occa- 

 sioning the least pain, and, in some of the lower animals, the whole 

 of the upper nervous mass has been cut away, without the animal 

 manifesting any uneasiness, until the instrument came close to the 

 medulla oblongata. Cases of disease of the brain have been re- 

 corded which lead to the same conclusion. Dr. Abercromby men- 

 tions having seen a lady who died suddenly with scarcely a single 

 symptom, and who was so well the evening before death as to have 

 been at a dancing-party, one half of whose brain was ascertained, 

 after death, to have been completely destroyed. 



From the organization of the brain we may infer that it is a gal- 

 vanic battery, and that all the phenomena of nervous influence is 

 produced by its action. The two hemispheres are only united 

 together at one point, the carpus callosum, and the nervous fluid or 

 influence crosses this in opposite directions, as is proved by post 

 mortem examinations. An injury on one side of the head has 

 caused a paralysis of the extremities below, on the opposite side. 

 Dr. VERE, of this city, witnessed this fact, and so have others ; 

 which proves that one hemisphere controls the opposite parts of the 

 body and vice versa. Haller thus remarks, page 182, " The 

 nervous fluid, which is the instrument of sense and motion, must be 

 exceedingly movable, so as to carry the impressions of sense, or 

 commands of the will, to the places of their destination, without 

 any imaginable loss of time, and cannot receive the cause of its 

 motions only from the heart. Moreover, it is very thin and invi- 

 sible, and destitute of all taste and smell ; yet reparable from the 

 aliments. It is not on any account to be confounded with that 

 visible, viscid liquor exhaling into the intervals of the nervous 

 chords." 



Electric matter is the most powerful and best calculated to excite 

 motion and even a ligature on a nerve, although it takes away 

 sense and motion, never stops an electrical current. The effect of 

 pressure on the brain is surprising and demonstrates its functions. 

 A person in Paris had received an injury of the brain from which 

 he had recovered, but left a portion of it bare. For a trifle he 



