FUNCTIONS Ot THE BRAIN. 75 



70, which is said to have been kept alive for fifty-one days 

 after both hemispheres had been removed by a series of 

 ablations and the corpora striata and thalami had softened 

 away, shows how much the mid-brain centres and the cord 

 can do even in the canine species. Taken together, the 

 number of reactions shown to exist in the lower centres by 

 these observations make out a pretty good case for the Mey- 

 nert scheme, as applied to these lower animals. That 

 scheme demands hemispheres which shall be mere sujDjjle- 

 ments or organs of repetition, and in the light of these 

 observations they obviously are so to a great extent. But 

 the Meynert scheme also demands that the reactions of the 

 lower centres shall all be native, and we are not absolutely 

 sure that some of those which we have been considering 

 may not have been acquired after the injury ; and it further- 

 more demands that they should be machine-like, whereas 

 the expression of some of them makes us doubt whether 

 they may not be guided by an intelligence of low degree. 



Even in the lower animals, ihen, there is reason to soften 

 down that opposition between the hemispheres and the 

 lower centres which the scheme demands. The hemi- 

 spheres may, it is true, only supplement the lower centres, 

 but the latter resemble the former in nature and have 

 some small amount at least of ' spontaneity ' and choice. 



But when we come to monkeys and man the sclieme 

 well-nigh breaks down altogether; for we find that the 

 hemispheres do not simply repeat voluntarily actions which 

 the lower centres perform as machines. There are many 

 functions which the lower centres cannot by themselves 

 perform at all. When the motor cortex is injured in a man 

 or a monkey genuine paralysis ensues, which in man is 

 incurable, and almost or quite equally so in the ape. Dr. 

 Seguin knew a man with hemi-blindness, from cortical 

 injury, which had persisted unaltered for twenty-three 

 years. 'Traumatic inhibition' cannot possibly account 

 for this. The blindness must have been an ' Ausfallser- 

 scheinung,' due to the loss of vision's essential organ. It 

 would seem, then, that in these higher creatures the lower 

 centres must be less adequate than they are farther down 

 in the zoological scale ; and that even for certain elementary 



