124 MEMOIR OF MAGENDIE. 



I proceed to the second point of tlie discussion : the special functions of the 

 fifth and seventh pair. M. Bell had contented himself with cutting the fifth 

 pair at its exit from the foramina of the face ; M. Magendie boldly divided it 

 within the skull. The result, from this circumstance alone, was more striking ; 

 but from this result, imposing as it was, how many inadmissible consequences did 

 he draw ? He pronounced the fifth pair to be not only the nerve of general sensi- 

 bility, of the tactile sensibility of the face, but also the nerve of all the proper 

 Organs of the senses. It was the nerve of olfaction, of audition, of vision; he took 

 certain simple efi'ects of a subsequent alteration for direct and immediate effects. 

 M. Bell, more practiced than he in analysis, pointed out to him that the 

 phenomena in question are more complicated than he supposed. In the phenom- 

 enon of olfaction, for instance, there is the sense of smell, the act of scenting, 

 and the tactile sensibility ; the first depends on the olfactory nerve, the second 

 on the seventh pair, and the last on the fifth pair. " Having caused a dog," 

 says M, Bell, " to respire ammonia, after the seventh pair had been cut, it 

 experienced at first no effects of irritation of the pituitary membrane. This was 

 because it no longer possessed the power of snuffing up, or drawing in with force^ 

 the ammoniacal vapor. * * * If I ]iad not paid attention to these circum- 

 stances, I might have believed, in view of what I saw, that the nerve of the 

 seventh pair was the nerve of smell, as a well-known French physiologist has 

 done, who has concluded too precipitately that he had discovered the nerve o 

 vision and of smell in the fifth pair." 



It is not difficult to see the different turns of mind in the two men whom 1 

 compare : the one was more meditative, more thoughtful — the other more a mar 

 of action than of thought ; the one might be said to have placed no sufficient value 

 on experiments, the other no sufficient value on ideas ; the one would never prob- 

 ably have made experiments had he not begun by having ideas ; the other might 

 perhaps have had but few ideas had he not begun by multiplying experiments. 

 Charles Bell (born 1774, died 1842) was the fourth sonof a poor Presbyterian 

 minister of Scotland. The second of his brothers, John Bell, having become 

 professor of surgery in the University of Edinburgh, invited him thither, and 

 initiated him in anatomical studies and instruction. First impressions are 

 strongest; a single good indication given in time furnishes sometimes the open 

 mg for a career. Mr. John Shaw, in a prefatory account of Mr. Bell, * tells us 

 that " he commenced his public labors as assistant of his brother, John Bell, 

 who relinquished to him the part of the course of anatomy which treats of the 

 nerves, and counselled him to study the brain by its base, by its relations with 

 the spinal marrow, instead of cutting it by horizontal sections. The intelligent 

 student soon perceived many things which he has developed in this volume, and 

 which might perhaps have always escaped him, had he not then formed the 

 habit of constantly considering, under this point of view, the relations of the 

 brain with the rest of the nervous system." 



Arrived at the age of thirty years, Charles Bell felt ill at ease in a depend- 

 ent situation. Quitting his brother, and removing to London, he there long 

 endured isolation and poverty. In 1805 appeared his first work, the Anatomy 

 of Expression. In 1811 he produced his Sketch of a Neio Anatomy of the Brain, 

 the small success of which was the source, as has been already said, of much 

 discouragement. Having been appointed surgeon of the hospital of Middlesex, 

 he seemed wholly devoted to instruction and practice; yet we find, in one of 

 his letters of that date, this passage : " Under a semblance of forgetfulness I 

 am^always Brooding over my grand idea; it occupies me unceasingly." 



Some years later, on quitting a session of the Koyal Society, in which he had 

 read his first and successful memoir, he remarked: "At last I may assure my- 

 self that I am no visionary. My discovery Avill place me by the side of Har- 



'^ The Nervous System of the Human Body, as explained in a, series of papers read before 

 tiio ±toyai bociety of London, with an appendix of cases and consultations on nervous dis- 

 eases. Edinburgh, 1836. 



