TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION 1. 639 
University and King’s College of Aberdeen. In the same year (1712) he was 
admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. 
Blair’s name is very slightly known; it has been rescued from absolute 
oblivion by a short memoir written for the Dundee Symposium by Mr. Alexander 
M. Stevenson, and published in the ‘ Proceedings’ of the Botanical Society of 
Edinburgh in 1907. From his writings it soon becomes apparent to us that 
Patrick Blair was a student of science of first rank: a discoverer and initiator 
of cardinal importance, both in vegetable and in animal physiology, a botanist 
and an anatomist of the pioneer type. ‘The best-known of his botanical works, 
under the title ‘Botanick Essays,’ was published in 1720. But the work by 
which his name is to be earmarked in the history of physiology is that of 
1710-12, in which he gives a peculiarly accurate account of the nerves of the 
elephant’s trunk. 
On April 27, 1709, Patrick Blair, surgeon, from his home at Dundee wrote a 
letter to Dr. Hans Sloane, Secretary of the Royal Society, containing ‘a full and 
exact description of all the bones of an elephant which died near Dundee, 
April 27, 1706.’ This letter, under the title ‘Osteographia Elephantina,’ occu- 
pies upwards of a hundred pages of the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ of the 
Royal Society, vol. 27, 1710-1712, and is illustrated by four plates. It appeared 
as a separate publication under the same title in the year 1713. 
Blair writes : ‘After this animal had travelled most part of Europe, she came 
at last to this Kingdom . . . and when they were come within a mile of this 
Place, the poor Beast, much fatigued and wearied, fell down. She died the 
next morning being Saturday, April 27th, 1706. 
‘I had not much above an Hour to bestow when Night came on, and that 
amidst a Throng and Rabble in mighty hot weather. 
‘During that time I caused the Head to be cut off and brought to Town. 
‘On Monday I went out again,’ &c., &e. 
The passages in that monograph that are of greatest interest to us as physio- 
logists are those relating to the anatomy and physiology of the fifth and seventh 
nerves. Any competent judge who examines the text and illustrations of the 
paper will recognise in it a first-rate contribution to exact knowledge, and the 
quotation I am about to read will, I am sure, be recognised at once by every 
physiologist as affording the clearest possible evidence and proof of Blair’s 
high quality. For it was published in 1712, more than a century before the 
problem of motor and sensory nerves in general, and of the two great facial 
nerves in particular, came to a head. Physiologists who are familiar with the 
writings of Charles Bell and of Herbert Mayo in the years 1821 to 1824, when 
the functions of the fifth and seventh nerves were made to play a part in the 
great problem of distinct motor and sensory nerve-channels, will recognise in 
Patrick Blair, of Dundee, the Dr. Blair to whom Mayo refers in 1822 as having 
‘formed the opinion at the beginning of the eighteenth century from his minute 
examination of the proboscis of an elephant that the infra-orbital nerves are 
nerves of touch.’ Mayo’s reference is, indeed, little more than an allusion ky 
means of which he indicates his acquaintance with the subject and his rejection 
* of the account of it that had been published by his master, Charles Bell, in the 
‘Philosophical Transactions’ of the previous year. As described by Bell in his 
first paper to the Royal Society, ‘On the Nerves,’ read July 12, 1821', the fifth 
nerve is the nerve of sensation and voluntary motion to the skin and muscles of 
the face, and these same muscles are also supplied by the seventh nerve as 
regards their respiratory action; he accordingly characterises the latter as a 
super-added or respiratory nerve, and at page 419 applies this view to the case of 
the elephant’s trunk :— 
‘It has been already stated that when a feeler, or antenna, is examined, if it 
be simply for sensation, one nerve only runs along it. It was suggested to him 
(the author) that if his theory were true the trunk of the elephant, being hollow 
and connected with respiration, it should have two nerves; whereas in the obser- 
vations of Cuvier it was stated to have only one. An opportunity of ascertainin 
the truth of this was very liberally granted by Mr. Herbert Mayo, who ha 
lately a young elephant for dissection. The two nerves were readily found, both 
1 Phil, Trans, R.S., part ii., 1821, pp. 398-424, 
