34 Foster, Physical Basis of Psychical Events. 



way. The person may have no mere vocal difificulty 

 whatever ; the machinery for speech as speech, and this 

 we have reason to think is made up of nerve units lying in 

 the frontal region of the brain in one of the so-called frontal 

 convolutions, may be intact. On the other hand, his mere 

 visual sensations may be also intact : there may be every 

 evidence that he "sees" everything perfectly, including the 

 printed word. He is in this condition ; he can pronounce 

 the word, he can see the word, but he cannot pronounce 

 the word as the result of seeing it. He can pronounce 

 the word perfectly when the motive for speaking it is 

 hearing it, or some other motive than the seeing it. 

 Between the seeing and the speaking some link is snapped. 

 I bring this "word-blindness," as it is called, to your notice 

 because, in respect to it, we have evidence from cases of 

 disease that the nervous link which is snapped lies in the 

 cerebral cortex, not in the occipital area concerned in the 

 development of visual sensations, not in the frontal convo- 

 lution where the nervous processes which issue in the vocal 

 utterance are marshalled, but in a limited spot of the 

 cortex situate between the two, in what is called the angular 

 gyrus. When this is damaged, word-blindness results, and 

 the more the damage is limited to this spot, the more 

 clearly the psychical defect appears as mere word-blindness. 

 As we have seen, the occipital cortex is concerned in 

 visual sensations. I might add that most probably it, too, 

 is mainly concerned in visual perceptions. Not only are the 

 crude sensations excited by the arrangements of black and 

 white of the component letters developed by means of it 

 in the manner which I have attempted to indicate, but by 

 means of it also, or of some part of it most probably (I am 

 speaking now of a matter of which our knowledge is very 

 vague), in some way or other takes place the further 

 psychical elaboration of the constituent sensations into the 

 apperception of the word as a whole. But in order to 



