46 



PSTCHOLOGT. 



pieces of meat and pieces of cork before them. If they 

 went straight at them, tliey saw; and if they chose the meat 

 and left the cork, they smv discrwiinatinghj . The quarrel 

 is very acrimonious ; indeed the subject of localization of 

 functions in the brain seems to have a peculiar effect on the 

 temper of those who cultivate it experimentally. The 

 amount of preserved vision which Goltz and Luciani report 

 seems hardly to be worth considering, on the one hand; 

 and on the other, Munk admits in his penultimate paj^er 

 that out of 85 dogs he only ' succeeded ' 4 times in his opera- 

 tion of producing complete blindness by complete extirpa- 

 tion of his ' Sehsphiire.' * The safe conclusion for us is that 

 Luciani's diagram, Fig. 14, represents something like the 



Fig. 14. — Distribution of the Visual Function in the Cortex, according to Luciani. 



truth. The occipital lobes are far more important for 

 vision than any other part of the cortex, so that their com- 

 plete destruction makes the animal almost blind. As for 

 the crude sensibility to light which may then remain, noth- 

 ing exact is known either about its nature or its seat. 



In the monkey, doctors also disagree. The truth seems, 

 however, to be that the occipital lobes in this animal also are 

 the part connected most intimately with the visual function. 

 The function would seem to go on when very small portions 

 of them are left, for Ferrier found no ' appreciable impair- 

 ment ' of it after almost complete destruction of them on both 

 sides. On the other hand, he found complete and perma- 

 nent blindness to ensue when they and the angular gyri in 

 addition were destroyed on both sides. Munk, as well as 



* Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte, 1886, vii, viii, p. 134. 



