Antagonistic Muscles and Reciprocal Innervation. 183 



exerts no modifying influence upon her foster-children in so 

 far as can be tested by the examination of a single 

 generation. 



(6) It follows, if the above is true, that in case telegony be actually 

 demonstrated, the characteristics of a primary husband 

 which are transmitted to the offspring got by a secondary 

 husband, can only be so transmitted through the ovarian 

 ova of the mother. 



Romanes, in his work on ' Darwin and after Darwin,' vol. 2, 

 pp. 146 — 148, refers to my earliest experiment; he thereon remarks 

 that rabbits when crossed in the ordinary way never throw inter- 

 mediate characters, and that the experiment is clearly without 

 significance as far as it bears upon the inheritance of acquired 

 characters. 



Mr. Romanes does not give his authority for the statement that 

 rabbits when crossed never throw intermediate characters, and I 

 venture to think he was mistaken in his view ; that they do produce 

 young which are apparently pure bred of the one type or the other, 

 and possibly both, in the same litter is no doubt true, but it is also 

 true that some at any rate of the young got by crossing are of an 

 intermediate character. An examination of the litters T got by 

 crossing a Dutch buck with Belgia.n Hare does confirms this view. 



" Antagonistic Muscles and Reciprocal Innervation. Fourth, 

 Note." By C. S. Sherrington. M.A., M.D., F.R.S., Uni- 

 versity College, Liverpool, and E. H. Hering, M.D. 

 (Prague). Received August 4, — Read November 18, 1897. 



(From the Physiological Laboratory, University College, Liverpool.) 



The object of the present communication is to report to the Society 

 further on the occurrence in so-called " voluntary " muscles of in- 

 hibition as well as of contraction, as result of excitation of the cortex 

 cerebri. We have obtained by excitation of the cerebral cortex some 

 remarkable instances of what one of us has described* under the 

 name of " reciprocal innervation^ that is, a species of co-ordinate 

 innervation in which the relaxation of one set of a co-ordinated 

 complexus of muscle-gronps occurs as accompaniment of the active 

 contraction of another set. 



The experiments, the subject of the present communication, have 

 been carried out in the monkey (Macacus cynocephalus) and the 

 cat. The appropriate region of the cortex cerebri has been freely 

 exposed after removal of part of the cranium and subsequent 



* ' Eoy. Soc. Proc.,' vol. 60. 



