112 MEMOIR OF MAGEJ^'DIE. 



wrote in his journal : ' My discoveries have made more impression in France 

 than here ; I'have received a second letter from Magendie, where he says that 

 if I would send him a short analysis of my experiments, I would receive the 

 medal decreed by the institute.' (Biography of Sir Charles Bell, British 

 Review, October, 1846.) Whoever knows the susceptibility and jealous character 

 of Charles Bell will readily agree that he would not have expressed himself in 

 this manner regarding a stranger who had omitted in an appreciative account of 

 his labors the finest of his discoveries. 



" On the occasion of my first publications respecting the functions of the roots, 

 M. Schaw wrote to me that Ch. Bell had formerly made some experiments 

 analogous to mine. He sent me a small pamphlet, dated 1811, and which had 

 been communicated only to the author's friends, with a view, as he said, to have 

 their opinion touching his new but still undecided ideas on the anatomy of the 

 brain. I lost no time in transcribing word for word, in my Journal of Physiology, 

 the passages which had reference to the roots, and I took care to add that neither 

 myself nor any one else in France had the least suspicion of the existence of 

 this tract. Fortunately for my own researches, it contained nothing which 

 touched upon the capital fact, the distinction, namely, between the two rachidian 

 roots — these as nerves of sensation, those as nerves of movement. 



"In effect, Ch. Bell, preoccupied with his ideas on irritability, simply says 

 that in cutting the posterior root, he had produced no contraction in the muscles, 

 while the muscles were contracted when he touched with the point of the instrument 

 the anterior root. Such is the experiment as he describes it. We see that not 

 only had he not distinguished the roots into sensitive and motive, but that even 

 the word sensibility had not been pronounced. How could it be otherwise, 

 since he operated only on animals recently dead ? 



" In fine, Ch. Bell had had before me, but without my knowledge, the idea 

 of separately cutting the rachidian roots ; he had also had the merit of discovering 

 that the anterior influences the muscular contractility more than the posterior. 

 As regards priority in this, I have, from the first, done him entire justice ; but 

 when the question relates to having established that these roots have distinct 

 properties and functions — that the anterior preside over movement, and the 

 posterior over sensation — this discovery I must claim as my own. Ch. Bell had 

 not indicated, nor even caught a glimpse of it, since it in no wise results from 

 the experiment which he relates. It is therefore my own work, and must 

 remain as one of the columns of the monument reared by French physiology 

 since the commencement of the present century." 



Of recurient sensibility. — The discovery of recurrent sensibility was the 

 result of the second series of M. Magendie's researches. On this interesting 

 subject, which he alone had yet ventured to attempt, the following is his first 

 Note, (May 20, 1839,) containing the summary of his new experiments on the 

 nervous system : 



"The sensitive nerves and the rachidian motors are equally sensible when 

 they are both intact.* If we cut the sensitive nerves, the motor nerves imme- 

 diately lose their sensibility.! If the motor nerves are cut in the middle, the 

 end which remains attached to the spinal marrow is wholly insensible ; the op- 

 posite end preserves, on the contrary, an extreme sensibility.^ In that case, 

 the sensibility proceeds from the circumference to the centre.§ If the sensitive 

 nerves be cut at their middle part, the end which attaches to the marrow is 

 highly sensible; the end which attaches to the ganglion has, on the contrary, 

 lost all sensibility. "II 



We come now to Xho, last Note of M. Magendie on the recurrent sensibility, 

 which is also the most important, June 28, 1847 : 



*An assured fact, if account be taken of the recurrent seasibility. t A real fact and wholly 

 new. X Again a fact, and still a new one. ^ Evidently. 1| Comptes rendus de V Academic des 

 Sciences, t. viii, p. 76. 



