MY PREDECESSORS. 383 



bands, presently break up into fibres which continue to the 

 peripheral termuiation. In presence of such a structure, 

 Meissner could scarcely have missed the suggestion it forced 

 upon him : "In Mermis the anatomical proof is easy that a 

 conduction from the periphery to the centre must take place 

 by some other means than that of a completely isolated and 

 throughout equally constructed fibre." * On reading this 

 sentence, I fancied that the same idea must have occurred to 

 him as to me, and that he would follow it up by some further 

 observations, or at any rate by some physiological reflections. 

 Two years later, however, he published another Memoii",f 

 wherein he notices this peculiarity of the nerve-trunks as 

 " certainly very important for the physiology of the nervous 

 system ; " but instead of seizing its true significance, he pro- 

 poses an explanation which would never have been proposed, 

 if the facts I have observed had been known to him ; for, 

 confining himself to the peculiar structure of the trunks and 

 branches of these worms, he suggests that " the trunks must 

 not be regarded as trunks, as anatomical bundles of isolated 

 fibres, but as peculiar and intermediate conducting organs 

 interposed between the central organ and the jjeripheral 

 nerves. If they are really to be regarded as simple nerve- 

 trunks, in the sense in which the word is used as respects 

 higher animals, we ought to find them composed of fibres — 

 which is not the case." I need scarcely criticise such a sug- 

 gestion ; the mere fact of a sympathetic ganglion being con- 

 nected with a nerve which, although fibrous, has its inter- 

 space of granules, is enough to destroy the hypothesis ; not 



* Loc. cit. t Loc. cil. vii. 99. 



