



which swells, hardens, and determines the motion of those parts of the 

 skeleton to which it is attached. The nerves and the brain are essenti- 

 ally the organs of these two properties, a division of the former is attend- 

 ee} with a loss of sentiment and voluntary motion in the parts to which 

 they are distributed. The other kind of sensibility is, on the contrary, 

 quite independent of the presence of nerves; it exists in all organs, 

 although all do not receive nervous,filaments. It might even be asserted, 

 that the cerebral nerves are not at all essential to the life of nutrition ; the 

 bones, the arteries, the cartilages, and several other tissues, in which no 

 nerves are seen to enter, are nourished equally well with the organs in 

 which they exist in considerable number ; the muscles themselves will 

 carry on their own internal osconomy, notwithstanding the division of 

 their nerves ; only, deprived of those means of communication with the 

 brain, they can no longer receive from it the principle of voluntary con- 

 traction; instead of that sudden, energetic, and lasting shortening, which 

 the will determines in them, they become merely capable of those quiver- 

 ings called palpitations. 



The anatomist who studies the nerves with a view to ascertain their 

 termination, finds them all arising from the brain and spinal marrow, and 

 proceeding by a longer or shorter course, to the organs of motion or of 

 sensation; let him take his scalpel and dissect one of our limbs, the thigh, 

 for instance, he will see the cords parting into numerous threads, most of 

 which disappear in the thickness of the muscles, whilst others, after 

 creeping for a time about the cellular tissue, which joins the skin to the 

 apon eurosis, end on the inward surface of the skin, of which they com- 

 pose the texture, and expand into sentient papillae on its furface. The 

 bones, the cartilages, the ligaments, the arteries, and the veins, all those 

 parts whose action is not under the controul of the will, are without 

 them*. Nevertheless, all those parts, which, in their natural state, send 

 no perceptible impressions to the brain, which, when once insulated, may 

 be tied and cut, without any sign of pain from the animal, and whose ac- 

 tion the will does not controul. are yet endued with a sensibility and a 

 contractility, which enable them, after their own manner, to feel and to 

 ' act, to recognize in the fluids that moisten them, what is suited to their 

 nourishment, and to separate that recrementitious part which has suita- 

 bly affected their particular mode of sensibility!. 



In confining our attention then, to the consideration of a single limb, 

 we may easily satisfy ourselves of the existence of two modes of feeling, 



* Comparatively speaking ; the nerves may be traced into bones, accompanying- 

 their arteries and veins, and we should with greater propriety declare that toe cannot 

 see them in the coats of arteries and veins, than that they do not exi.st We are unable 

 to conceive how such vessels can be organs of secretion, assimilation or absorption 

 without a nervous system of their own ; which we believe has its peculiarities and mo- 

 difications to suit the purposes for which it is designed. Godman. 



f- All these parts may be considered to possess ganglial nerves ; for as these nerves 

 may be demonstrated on the more considerable trunks of arteries, even in the extremi- 

 ties, they may be supposed to accompany these vessels to their most minute ramifica- 

 tions and terminations, and to bestow on them the manifestations which these parts of 

 the vascular system evince. Such, then, being the constitution and connexion of the 

 arterial and capillary vessels, no texture which possess these vessels can be considered 

 to be destitute of this class of nerves. Those nerves that belong to the other class, or 

 the cerebral, may be inferred to exist, in an organ, more or less abundantly, or to be 

 entirely absent from it, according to the nature of the phenomena which that organ 

 presents. See CHAPTERS OK THE CIRCULATION, SENSATION AND MOTION. 



