RECENT PEOGRESS IN PHYSIOLOGY. 447 



swollen into a great flood. It is quite true that long before a new era in 

 onr knowledge of the central nervous system had been opened ii]) by the 

 works of Ferrier and of Fritsch and Hitzig. Between 1870 and 1880 

 progress in this branch of physiology had been continued and rapid. 

 Yet that progress had left much to be desired. On the one hand the 

 experimental inquiries, even when they were carried out with the safe- 

 guard of an adequate psychical analysis of the phenomena which pre- 

 sented themselves, and this was not always the case, sounded a very 

 uncertain note, at least when they dealt with other than simply motor 

 effects. They were, moreover, not unfrequently in discord with clinical 

 experience. In general the conclusions which were arrived at through 

 them, save such as were based on the production of easily recognized 

 and often measurable movements, were regarded by many as conclu- 

 sions of the kind which could not be ignored, Avhich demanded respect- 

 ful attention, and yet which failed to carry conviction. It seems to be 

 risking too much to trust too implicitly to the apparent teaching of the 

 results arrived at; something appeared wanting to give these their full 

 validity, to explain their full and certain meaning by showing their 

 connection with what was known in other ways and by other methods. 

 On the other hand, during nearly all this time, in spite of the valuable 

 results acquired by the continually improving histological technique, by 

 the degeneration method, and by the developmental method, by the 

 study of the periods of myelination, most of us, at all events, were sit- 

 ting down, as our forefathers had done, before the intricate maze of 

 encephalic structure, fascinated by its complexity, but wondering what 

 it all meant. Even when we attemj^ted to thread our way through the 

 relatively simple tangle of the spinal cord, to expect that we should 

 ever see our way so to unravel out the strands of fibers, here thick, 

 there thin, now twisting and turning, and anon running straight, or so 

 to set out in definite constellations the seeming milky way of star-like 

 cells, so to do this as to make the conformation of the cord explain the 

 performances of which it is capable, appeared to be something beyond 

 our reach. And when we passed from the cord to those cerebral struc- 

 tures the even gross topography of which is the despair of the beginner 

 in anatomical studies, the multiple maze of gray and white matter 

 seemed to frame itself into the letters graven on the gateway of the 

 city of Dis, and bid us leave all hope behind. 



What a change has come upon us during the past dozen years, and 

 how great is the hope of ultimate success which we have to-day. Into 

 what at the meeting at Montreal seemed a cloudy mass, in which most 

 things were indistinct and doubtful, and into which each man could 

 read images of possible mechanisms according as his fancy led, the 

 method of Golgi has fallen like a clarifying drop, and at the present 

 moment we are watching with interest and delight how that vague 

 cloud is beginning to clear up and develoi) into a sharp and definite 

 picture, in which lines objectively distinct and saying one thing only 



