MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 701 



come under his own observation. His words run thus in trans- 

 lation : 'After a long-continuing stagnation of blood at the end of 

 the small intestine and the beginning of the large, in consequence 

 of which exudations and adhesions of the peritoneum ensued, the 

 entire right half of the body became weaker than the left, was 

 tired sooner by exertion ; the right foot became cold sooner, under 

 the same circumstances, than the left ; the right ear became much 

 more rapidly the seat of vascular dilatation than the left ; and 

 other similar phaenomena developed themselves. After a great 

 abscess under the right gluteus maximus, and an immense loss of 

 pus, the right hand and the entire right arm became not only 

 evidently thinner to the eye than the left, but also actually 

 smaller.' These cases are decisive as to the interference of the 

 nervous system in the process of nutrition ; and, though organs 

 and structures, such as the epithelial and the cartilaginous, both 

 physiological and, I suppose, morbid, may and do exist and grow 

 in animal bodies being as devoid of blood-vessels and nerves as 

 though they were found in vegetables, still any arguments based 

 upon these undoubted facts can be met at once, if so we care to 

 meet them, with the more or less accepted physiological axioms, 

 ' The interdependence of parts augments with their development ; 

 the solidarity of organs increases and is more intimate with each 

 superaddition of a fresh factor to the entire economy.' But these 

 cases do not, of course, touch the question of the way in which this 

 nervous influence comes to act on the tissues, whether mediately 

 through the blood-vessels, or immediately on the tissues with which 

 they are supposed, in the case of the salivary glands by Pfliiger, 

 though not, as I apprehend, by Dr. Beale ('Phil. Trans.^ 1865, 

 p. 447)5 to become continuous. Nor does such an experiment as 

 that of Bidder, in which a salivary gland, under nerve-stimulation, 

 picked out two-thirds of the entire quantity of iodide of potassium 

 in the circulation, to one-third picked out by the substance of its 

 fellow, not so stimulated. For a more innervated gland is also a 

 more vascular gland ; and of the two antecedents, greater nerve- 

 current and greater blood -current, we have no right from this 

 experiment to say that the one rather than the other is the cause 

 of this particular consequent. And much probability will come to 

 attach itself to Virchow's views, according to which innervation is 

 not proven to increase nutrition directly, but works only mediately 



