288 REPORTS ON THE STATE OP SCIENCE. 



The documents belonging to these two provinces have to be 

 examined separately and considered conjointly. 



As regards the spinal roots, the documents to be examined are: — 



A. — Charles Bell, 1811 : ' Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain.' Submitted 

 for the observations of his friends by Charles Bell, F.R.S.E. Small octavo, 

 pp. 36, published by Strachan & Preston, printers, London : without date, 

 but on collateral evidence the date 1811 is accepted; Bell's annotated copy is 

 in the Library of the Royal Society ; his presentation copy to Sir Joseph Banks 

 is in the Library of the British Museum. 



B. — Francois Magendie, 1822 : ' Experiences sur les Fonctions des Nerfs 

 Rachidiens ' ; ' Journal de Physiologie Experimentale et Pathologique,' par 

 F. Magendie. Tome II, Annee 1822, pp. 276-9. 



As regards Bell's ' Idea ' of 1811, the most careful reading entirely 

 fails to bring to light any paragraph or any allusion indicative of a dis- 

 tinction between motor and sensory functions of nerve-roots. The 

 distinction he draws is between cerebral and cerebellar roots, the former 

 subserving the functions of animal life — i.e., the obvious motor mani- 

 festations of sensation, the latter the functions of nutrition or vegetative 

 life, or, as he expresses it, ' the secret operations of the bodily frame. ' 

 And the only description of an experiment consists in the following 

 sentence : — 



P. 22. — On laying bare the roots of the spinal nerves, I found that I could 

 cut across the posterior fasciculus of nerves, which took its origin from the 

 posterior portion of the spinal marrow without convulsing the muscles of the 

 back, but that on touching the anterior fasciculus with the point of the knife 

 the muscles of the back were immediately convulsed. 



No details are given ; we do not learn from this description what was 

 the animal used nor whether it was alive or dead. It is only from a 

 subsequent allusion made by Bell at page 29 of ' An Exposition of the 

 Natural System of Nerves of the Human Body,' published in 1824, 

 that we learn that the description applies to a rabbit stunned — i.e., 

 killed by a blow behind the ear. And in the interval between 1811 and 

 1821 Bell, as he says himself, made no other experiment on the nerve- 

 roots. 



It is imagined that Bell interpreted the result of this experiment as 

 meaning that the anterior root was motor and the posterior root sensory. 

 But it is clear to anyone having read what Bell wrote in the ' Idea ' 

 that he took the result to mean that the anterior and manifestly sen- 

 sitive root was cerebral and the posterior insensitive root cerebellar. 



Clearly the distinction between motor and sensory nerves was not 

 established nor even thought of by Bell in 1811. The whole of the 

 ' Idea ' is purely speculative upon lines leading anywhere except in 

 that direction, and contains no experiment pointing towards it. During 

 the next ten years, from 1811 to 1821, Bell did and said nothing more 

 about the nerve-roots. 



In 1821, at the age of forty-seven, he communicated Hie first of a 

 series of six papers to the ' Philosophical Transactions ' of the Royal 

 Society, to which we shall refer in a moment, as forming the docu- 

 mentary record of his scientific title as a physiologist. Of these six 

 papers the first is the most important, dealing with the nerves of the 

 face, and published in 1821 — i.e., before the publication by Magendie 

 of his own experiments on the spinal roots. 



