970 The American Naturalist. [December, 
passing from the periphery to the cortex, and arousing there 
the activities lying nearest to the final-sensory results, should 
be of crucial importance in our investigation of the molecular 
differences assumed to underly our different senses. Regarding 
these nerve currents two main opinions are held. Professor 
Wundt conceives that all the sensory cortical cells are equally 
potent of all the different sense-forms at our birth; and that 
the sort of response they actually give is dependent on the form 
of the impulse that reaches them through the peripheral nerves 
to which they happen anatomically to be joined. 
According to an opposite view, advocated by Prof. James 
and many others, and to which in our introduction we have 
already made allusion, the currents in the different sensory 
nerves are all alike, and the sort of sensory responses they 
mediate are wholly dependent on the respective places in the 
cortex to which the different nerves run. The fundamental 
fact being, that each center is congenitally destined to its one 
specific form of activity, and the different centers to their 
permanently different forms. 
We can get a sharp notion of these opposing views, as the 
text-books commonly point out, by imagining the visual 
and the auditory nerves to be cut somewhere in their course, 
and the cut ends to be crossed and joined together again so 
that thereafter the visual impulses will reach the auditory 
center, and the auditory impulses the visual center. Under 
this new condition, according to Prof. Wundt, we should both 
hear and see precisely as before; because both of these cortical 
centers are capable of both renalis- because what happens 
depends on the different forms of the currents that are deter- 
mined in the peripheral sense organs; and because these run 
through unchanged, in spite of the crossing and that they are 
carried to new places. But, according to Prof. James’ view, 
where the currents in the different nerves are all alike, and the 
results depend wholly on the place in the cortex in which they 
arriye—under the crossed conditions one soona now “see the 
thunder and hear the lightning.” | 
The chief facts on which the latter notion is kanaal is, 
that while the sensory nerves generally are sensitive to several - 
