WILLIS 



69 



motor influences have to be taken into account. 

 The idea of vaso - motor action is woven as a 

 dominant thread into all the physiological and 

 pathological doctrines of to-day ; attempt to draw- 

 out that thread, and all that would be left would 

 appear as a tangled heap." 



5. Cerebral Localisation. 



Finally, moving upward along the anatomy of 

 the nervous system, physiology came to study the 

 motor - centres and special sense - centres of the 

 cerebral hemispheres. The year 1861 may fairly 

 be said to mark the beginning of the discovery of 

 these centres, when Broca, at a meeting of the 

 Anthropological Society of Paris, heard Aubertin's 

 paper on the connection between the frontal con- 

 volutions and the faculty of speech. But, of course, 

 some sort of belief in cerebral localisation had been 

 in the air long before Broca's time. Willis (1621- 

 1675), w ho was contemporary with Sir Isaac 

 Newton, had written of the brain as though its 

 convolutions, or " cranklings " as he called them, 

 showed that its work was departmental : — 



" As the animal spirits for the various acts of 

 imagination and memory ought to be moved within 

 certain and distinct limits, or bounded places, and 

 these motions to be often iterated or repeated 

 through the same tracts or paths, for that reason 

 these manifold convolutions and infoldings of the 

 brain are required for these divers manners of 

 ordinations of the animal spirits — to wit, that in 

 these cells or storehouses, severally placed, might 



