1870.] On Trophic Nerves. 201 



or motor accordingly as they are distributed to sensory or contractile 

 tissue-elements, and not by virtue of any inherent differences in 

 their own structure ; and if we have thus to modify our views, if not 

 as to the use of the words sensory and motor nerves, at all events 

 as to the meanings we attach to them, it would be doubly inexpedient 

 to introduce now new words, " trophic " and secretory ; considering, 

 firstly, that they are not old and familiar to us, nor possessed there- 

 fore of a claim upon our toleration ; and, secondly, that they labour 

 under just the same disadvantage of needing to be used with a 

 mental qualification as the older words in question. This is, how- 

 ever, but a question of words ; and it may be well now first to state 

 the facts so far as they appear to have been ascertained by obser- 

 vation and experiment ; and then, in the second place, to suggest, or 

 leave the reader to excogitate for himself, such a reading of them as 

 may seem best fitted to bind them together into a bundle easy to be 

 manipulated by the mental hand. 



I will begin by giving a few facts which bear directly enough 

 upon the influence exercised by psychical changes and cerebral affec- 

 tions upon processes of vegetative life, but which do not give any 

 clear indication as to the way, whether vasomotor or intracellular, 

 in which that influence is brought directly to bear. Facts of what 

 some persons would call great generality, but what others would, 

 and with greater propriety, call great complexity, are presented to 

 us in the familiar histories of defeated armies and of other bodies of 

 men subjected to depressing psychical influences. Such aggregations 

 of men are found to be more liable to succumb to various unhealthy 

 influences, such as those of dysentery, scorbutus, and malaria, than 

 are other aggregations of men similarly constituted except as to 

 their mental impressions or depression. But in generalibus latet 

 error; and as we have exact quantitative observations, showing that 

 prisoners in civil gaols perform the ordinary functions of life less per- 

 fectly, and at greater cost to their own organism, as also to that of 

 the body politic, than do honest, or, to use the safer term suggested 

 to me by a warder in Portland prison, unconvicted men, we had 

 better refer to them. These observations will be found recorded in 

 the Eeport of the British Association Meeting held in Manchester 

 in the year 1861, at p. 59, and, passim, in a "Eeport on the Action 

 of Prison Diet and Discipline on the Bodily Functions of Prisoners," 

 which we owe to Dr. Edward Smith, F.K.S., and Mr. W. E. Milner. 

 The " cerebral exhaustion," again, so common in these days of stress 

 and tension, is well known (as well it may be, considering what 

 abundant opportunities we have for observing it) to exercise a simi- 

 larly " atrophic " influence. Modern language, indeed, by altering 

 the meaning of the word indolence from that of freedom from pain 

 to that of freedom from labour, appears to show us that the real 

 relation of overivork to disease has been more or less obscurely 



