700 PHYSIOLOGY IN BELATION TO 



and Chronical Diseases of the Glands' (pp. 21-24), five cases of 

 injury to the testicular gland in stags are recorded. In such cases 

 as these after the injury to the testis, the horn may or may not be 

 shed annually, and it may never thenceforward lose its ' velvet ; * 

 but it never becomes the dry lowly vascular weapon of offence 

 which, in a fortnight or three weeks from the present time, we 

 shall see the bucks polishing their hard leather-coated horns into 

 against shrubs and trees. It remains vascular and spongy within, 

 and coated outside with a hairy skin, which may be prolonged into 

 pendulous outgrowths. Being sensitive and fragile, and bleeding 

 easily, it acts as a second sexual disqualification ; and, as I am 

 speaking of this correlation of growth, I may be allowed to add, 

 that its reality is further testified to by its absence after similar 

 lesions in reindeer, where both bucks and does are alike horned. 

 Now, I submit that the unilateral correspondence of malnutrition, 

 such as we have here, is as good an instance and exemplification of 

 Pfliiger's first law of reflex action, the law of unilateral [gleichseitig) 

 transmission of stimulus, as any unilateral or homolateral twitching 

 of any muscle can be in response to any one-sided stimulus. Only 

 the reflex action shows itself in the way of nutrition — a sort of 

 reversed hemiplegic nutrition, it is true — and not in that of move- 

 ment nor in that of secretion ^ 



Let me, as in the former case, lay alongside of the physiological 

 experiment a parallel to it from pathology. This I will do by the 

 help of Budge, who, at pages 794-795 of his ' Handbook of Phy- 

 siology,' gives us the two following short histories, which have 



was the author of several other works besides the one I have quoted. Their existence 

 has escaped the notice of Dr. Munk, in his interesting volumes, 'The Roll of the 

 Royal College of Physicians/ vol. ii. p. 132. Their titles are: i. ' De Tabe Glandular! 

 sive de usu Aquae Marinae in Morbis Glandularum Dissertatio ; ' in i vol. 8vo. ; pret. 

 58. 2. 'A Dissertation concerning the Use of Sea- water in Diseases of the Glands ; ' to 

 which is added an Epistolary Dissertation to R. Frewen, M.D. ; in one volume, 8vo. ; 

 price 5s. 



^ See Otto, *Neue seltene Beobachtungen Samml.,* vol. ii. p. 10; Elsaesser, ' DifF. 

 Sex. Mamm. praeter partes sexuales,' p. 36. Since writing the above, I have seen a 

 note to p. 22 of Mr. Paget's 'Surgical Pathology,* edited by Professor Turner, in 

 which the fact that no disturbance of nutrition is effected by mere transplantation of 

 the testis in cocks, is brought forward to show that no mere nervous disturbance can 

 account for these alterations of nutrition. I do not think that these negative results, 

 obtained from experiments on half a dozen birds, can outweigh the positive facts of 

 unilateral correspondence in malnutrition which have been so frequently observed in 

 mammals. (See Hunterian Catalogue, Osteological Series, vol. ii. p. 591.) 



