CUTAIfEOTTS NEBVE-TERMrNATIOJirS IN MAMMALS. 565 



we long afterwards made a similar mistake in the case of the 

 Mole. To these nerve-coils he attributed the sense of touch, and 

 proved the matter to be beyond doubt by the experiment of cut- 

 ting off the tails of Eats, and ascertaining that they did not move 

 about afterwards with the same agility. Subsequent investiga- 

 tion, however, has shown that such a ring exists upon the hairs 

 all over the body, and that there is no reason for supposing that 

 it has any thing to do with the sense of touch. "What the function 

 of this coil o£ fibres surrounding the hair-follicle may be is as yet 

 undetermined. At intervals along the fibres fusiform nuclei or cells 

 show themselves, exactly as they are seen on the fibres of !R.emak 

 or of the sympathetic nerve-system. As already mentioned, we 

 have been able to trace a connexion between the nerve-cells 

 already described and the fibres in the coil, whose relation to the 

 foUicle and the cells seems to reproduce the relationship of the 

 wire-coil to the coupled cells in the modern electric battery. 



At other timesspecial nerves join the coil,independently of either 

 the cells or medullated nerves coming from the lower part of 

 the hair-follicle. These nerves generally approach it horizontally 

 from the side, instead of lying in the same bundles with the nerves 

 going to the cells and forks. This coil surrounds the hair-follicle 

 immediately external to the terminal points of the forked nerve- 

 endings, lying between them and the basement-membrane, within 

 which, however, some of its outermost (as regards the hair) fibres 

 lie embedded. It occupies the zone immediately underneath the 

 opening of the sebaceous gland into tlie hair-follicle, and is 

 therefore the most superficial of all the nerve- structures lying 

 upon the follicle. It seems to represent, as far as the follicle is 

 concerned, the plexus of non-medullated nerves n, fig. 28, Plate 

 XVI., which lies immediately underneath the epidermis on the 

 general surface of the body, of which plexus the branches con- 

 stitute the intraepidermic fibrils, which, as we have already seen 

 and shall again notice, are also represented in the epithelial lining 

 of the hair-follicle, if, fig. 17, Plate XIV. Strange to say, Arn- 

 stein, who, in 1878, discovered the forked terminations on the hair- 

 follicle, denied the existence of the coil, thus showing the neces- 

 sity of examining many specimens before passing an opinion upon 

 the whole. It is true that in nearly one half of the specimens, 

 where the forked terminations are visible, neither the coil nor 

 the nerve-cells can be seen ; but that is merely because the gold 

 method has failed to show them. 



