734 The American Naturalist. [September, 
BRAIN CENTRES. 
By S. V. CLEVENĠER, M. D. 
Gradual and better understanding of the nature of the brain 
and its workings is being acquired and disseminated by inves- 
tigators and thinkers (who are not always one and the same). 
Twenty years ago the most incorrect ideas concerning the brain 
existed, consisting of a mingling of superstition with the 
incorrect phrenological deductions of Gall, Spurzheim, and 
their followers. Fritsch and Hitzig by experimentation upon 
dogs, Ferrier upon anthropoid apes, and the imitators and 
elaborators of their methods, foremost among whom stands 
Munk, have prepared the way for thinking pathologists and 
histologists such as Exner, Meynert, Spitzka, and von Gudden, 
for verification of previous findings. 
All too often the patient drudge of a microscopist, fully 
equipped with special technical knowledge, while able to 
accurately describe what he saw, was unable to interpret its 
significance, and quite as often those who are capable of mak- 
ing profound generalizations lack the data, the means or the 
time, necessary for research. A research with the brain is quite 
as important as that with the eyes or other sense organs. In 
fact it was not till the world had investigators with brains as 
well as eyes, such as Linné, Lamarck, Cuvier, and Darwin, that 
the investigating eyes knew what to look for, or recognized it 
when they had found it. 
The methods by which the motor centres in the brain were 
localized are simple enough. After a piece of the skull of an 
animal was removed, electrical stimulation of certain definite 
parts of the bared brain invariably produced certain muscular 
movements. Applied at one point the fingers would move, at 
another a certain arm movement would occur, and thus leg, 
tail, face, and tongue movements were induced, and often the 
muscular cordinations thus evoked were quite complicated, as 
in swimming, grasping, running, and emotional expression. 
Cutting away these same small portions of brain tissue pro- 
