XXX 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



Gaskell's work in this field was of the first importance. His papers are a 

 storehouse of observations of a fundamental nature. He elaborated his 

 theories and gave an admirable account of the whole subject in an article 

 on " The Contraction of Cardiac Muscle " in Schafer's ' Text Book of 

 Physiology/ published in 1900. It may be mentioned that the rhythm 

 of the heart was the subject of his Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society 

 in 1881, and that on the work mentioned above he was elected a Fellow of 

 tbe Society in the following year. 



In the course of his dissection of the accelerator nerve in mammals, G-askell 

 was struck by the overwhelming preponderance of non-medullated nerve 

 fibres in it, although the nerves centrally of ganglia from which the accelerator 

 fibres arose were mainly medullated, and this determined him to investigate 

 the relation of the sympathetic system to the spinal cord. At this time the 

 question of the relation of the sympathetic and other peripheral ganglia to 

 the cerebro-spinal system was in a state of profound confusion, and general 

 agreement had been reached on a few points only. A great number of facts 

 had been described, and they covered a wide area of descriptive anatomy in 

 different classes of vertebrates, of histology of nerve fibres and nerve cells, 

 and of physiology. Few observers covered more than a small portion of the 

 ground. Eesults were coining quickly and the ground was tilled rather 

 hastily. The practical disappearance of the theory that the " vegetative " 

 nervous system was independent of the " animal " nervous system had led to 

 the peripheral ganglia being less considered as a whole than they had been 

 at an earlier time, and to special explanations being put forward for the 

 working of the several parts. Thus, those writers who tried to give an 

 impartial summary of the state of knowledge found themselves reduced to 

 stating a number of more or less contradictory facts and irreconcilable 

 theories. 



Gaskell did not approach the subject from the point of view of what had 

 already been done or said. He approached it from the point of view suggested 

 by his observations on the accelerator nerves in the mammal. This method 

 had the disadvantage that it led him to leave uninvestigated some of the chief 

 difficulties which were felt at the time, but it had the advantage that it 

 enabled him to come to a rapid decision on certain important points. Gaskell 

 confined his attention to the efferent " visceral " fibres. His most important 

 conclusions were, that all efferent visceral fibres, whether in cranial or in 

 spinal nerves, were small medullated fibres, and that they left the cerebro- 

 spinal system in three groups — the cervico-cranial, the thoracic, and the 

 sacral — the thoracic portion being what was ordinarily called the sympathetic. 

 These conclusions re-established the connection of small medullated fibres 

 with the whole of the " organic " system described by Bidder and Volkmann 

 in 1842, gave an explanation of Reissner's statement in 1862 that the anterior 

 roots of the thoracic nerves contained bundles of small medullated fibres, 

 whilst those of the cervical and lumbar nerves contained only a few such 

 fibres scattered amongst the larger ones, supported the view which had been 



