294 Canadian Record of Science. 
Peter Redpath Museum, one of which is on the table. In 
their entirely arenaceous character, their concentric lines of 
growth, as well as in traces of a central axis or canal of 
small dimensions, and, in one instance, in a regularly 
rounded end, they resemble concretions, but I have been 
unable to find any central organic matter. This may, how- 
ever, have perished, leaving a mere cavity, as in the modern 
concretions above described, which would become filled with 
sand, like that of the enclosing cylinder. This at least ap- 
pears to me at present the most probable explanation of 
these puzzling forms. It would be confirmed if any distinct 
vegetable or zophytic axis could be found in any of the 
specimens, or any carbonaceous matter representing such 
an axis. In the meantime, it may be regarded as a more 
or less probable conjecture as to their origin. 
THE INFLUENCE OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM ON CELL 
LIFE (METABOLISM).* 
By T. Westry Mitis, M.A., M.D., Professor of Physiology, McGill 
University, Montreal. 
In a paper entitled “A Physiological Basis for an Im- 
proved Cardiac Pathology,” read in abstract in August, 
1887, before the Canada Medical Association, I endeavoured 
to show the relation of the cardiac nerves to the nutrition 
of the heart; but the subject grew as I proceeded with its 
study, so that I perceived that the theory I applied to the 
heart was equally true of the other organs and tissues. In 
that paper, which was published in the New York Medical 
Record of October 22nd, 1887, I advanced a large number of - 
facts derived from common experience, physiological ex- 
periment, pathology, and clinical medicine, in favor of what 
I termed a theory of constant neuro-trophic infiuence. 
* Read before the section in Physiology of the Congress of Amer- 
ican Physicians and Surgeons, at its first annual meeting, Septem- 
ber, 1888. : 
