228 MODE OF TERMINATION OF MOTOR NERVES, BY W. KUHNE. 



We may add, hypothetically, that the substratum represents 

 the remains of a formative material important in the develop- 

 ment of both the muscular and nervous tissue, and that a 

 similar explanation may be offered of the nature of the terminal 

 nerve bulbs in respect to the nervous tissue. 



HISTORY AND LITERATURE. The preceding observations have been 

 so ordered as to give the historical development of the principal facts 

 with which we are at present acquainted respecting the modes in 

 which nerves terminate in muscle. Those observers, therefore, that 

 have contributed any essentially new information on the subject, have 

 already been mentioned. A few remarks may, however, still be 

 added, since the questions involved have given occasion to lively con- 

 troversy during the last ten years. 



In few departments of histology has methodically prosecuted inves- 

 tigation, proceeding always from hypothesis, proved more fruitful in 

 results than in relation to the question of the connection existing 

 between nerve and muscle. The modern science of morphology has 

 undoubtedly reaped the value of that experience that has been obtained 

 in all other branches of knowledge, in having become a special sub- 

 ject ; and the example before us will serve, perhaps, to point out the 

 advantages that histology, which inclines as much towards mor- 

 phology as towards physiology, has to anticipate from hypotheses 

 borrowed from both departments. 



We shall here leave unnoticed the older works, so far, at least, as 

 they bear upon the unsatisfactory view of nerve loops. 



In the same year that Savi (2) communicated his important obser- 

 vations of the division of the primitive nerve fibres in the electric 

 organs of the Torpedo to a scientific congress at Florence, Doyere (1) 

 discovered the termination of the motor nerves in Milnesium tardi- 

 gradum. Eemak (3) then incidentally stated that in mammals the 

 nerves appeared to him to end in a plexus of pale fibres, winding 

 around the external surface of the sarcolemma. Quatrefages (4) 

 verified the discovery of Doyere in the case of Eolidina. In 1844, 

 E. Briicke and Job. Miiller first observed the division of primitive 

 nerve fibres in the muscles of the eye of the pike, and K. Wagner (6) 

 observed the same thing in the musculus hyoideus of the frog. Kolli- 

 ker (7) soon after established the Doyerian mode of termination of 

 the nerves in the larva of Chironomus, and Reichert (8) demonstrated 

 the division in the cutaneous muscle of the thorax in the frog, where 

 he found by direct counting that a few nerve fibres furnish more 

 branches than the number of the muscular fibres to be supplied. The 



