258 
Nachdruck verboten. 
The Intra-Cortical End-Apparatus of the Nerve Fibres. 
(Read at the Annual Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Society, 
Boston, June, 1886.) 
Abstract Paper by 
Henry J, Berxury, M. D., Baltimore. 
With two Figures, 
The exact histological appearance of the end-apparatus of the 
intra-cerebral nerve fibres, does not seem to have been determined 
and described with de same clearness of detail that has followed the 
application of the silver methods to some other portions of the neuron. 
LEenHOSSEK (Der feinere Bau des Nervensystems, 1895), writing at a 
late date, speaks of the free pointed endings to the nerve fibres. Even 
the great Spanish investigator, CAJAL, in his Nouvelles Idées du Systeme 
nerveux, 1895, is not quite so clear on this point as he usually is, 
when he writes that the ascending fibres of the cortex, which have 
a vertical or oblique course through the cellular layers, have their 
points of contact with the protoplasm of the short transverse pro- 
cesses (gemmulae) around which the fine ascending fibres twine; and 
entirely ignores the thought that these lateral buds may have any 
function in this act of transmission. Such a discharge of the nervous 
forces from cell to cell taking place at hundreds of indefinite points 
could not fail to produce stimuli that would be more often aberrant 
than direct, and in all likelihood such an arrangement would produce 
the utmost confusion of thought and motion, a veritable incoördination 
of the cerebral functions, and would reduce direct cerebration to a 
nullity. 
CAJAL is by no means unfamiliar with true ending of the nervous 
end-apparatus, for a few pages further on in the same book, in his 
description of the mode of termination of the collaterals of the great 
pyramidal cells, their finest branches are described as terminating 
freely by means of a nodosity. Furthermore, he figures in his plates 
all the free endings terminating in a similar manner, be they colla- 
terals, terminal branches from projection cells, or ramifying ones from 
the intermediary. 
It would appear that the Spanish savant had overlooked one im- 
portant factor when he takes for granted that the finer ramuscules 
