THE ORGANS OF VOLUNTARY MOTION. 429 



tion of all this apparatus of motion from the brain, 

 he insists upon with great clearness and force. 

 Thus he proved the necessity experimentally, by 

 cutting through some of the bundles of nerves 13 , and 

 thus preventing the corresponding motions. And it 

 is, he says 14 , allowed by all, both physicians and 

 philosophers, that where the origin of the nerve is, 

 there the seat of the soul (qyrj/movtKov TW ^x*^) 

 must be : now this, he adds, is in the brain, and not 

 in the heart. 



Thus the general construction and arrangement 

 of the organization by which voluntary motion is 

 effected, was well made out at the time of Galen, 

 and is found distinctly delivered in his works. We 

 cannot, perhaps, justly ascribe any large portion of 

 the general discovery to him: indeed, the concep- 

 tion of the mechanism of the skeleton and muscles 

 was probably so gradually unfolded in the minds of 

 anatomical students, that it would be difficult, even 

 if we knew the labours of each person, to select 

 one, as peculiarly the author of the discovery. But 

 it is clear that all those who did materially con- 

 tribute to the establishment of this doctrine, must 

 have possessed the qualifications which we find in 

 Galen for such a task ; namely, clear mechanical 

 views of what the tensions of collections of strings 

 could do, and an exact practical acquaintance with 

 the muscular cordage which exists in the animal 

 frame ; in short, in this as in other instances of 



13 Sprengel, ii. 157. '" I>e Hippocr. et Plat. Dog. viii. 1. 



