72 



THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 



1825, and Dax in 1836. Clinical observation, and 

 post-mortem examination, found the speech-centres ; 

 physiological experiments had nothing to do with 

 it ; and phrenology had, as it were, found them, 

 and then lost them. But at once, so soon as 

 practice gave the word to science, physiology set 

 to work. These clinical facts had been there all 

 the time ; loss of speech had gone with disease or 

 injury of " Broca's convolution " ever since man 

 had been on the earth, and nobody had seen the 

 significance of this sequence. Then, after 1861, 

 everything was changed ; and in a few years 

 physiology had mapped out a large part of the 

 surface of the brain, and had charted the motor- 

 centres. 



The story of Broca's convolution is told in 

 Hamilton's Text-Book of Pathology : — 



" In 1825, Bouillard collected a series of cases to 

 show that the faculty of speech resided in the frontal 

 lobes. In the year 1836 M. Dax, in a paper read 

 to the Medical Congress of Montpellier, stated as a 

 result of his researches that, where speech was lost 

 from cerebral causes, he believed the lesion was 

 invariably found in the left cerebral hemisphere, and 

 that the accompanying paralysis of the right side 

 of the body is consequent upon this. This paper 

 for long lay buried in the annals of medical litera- 

 ture, but was unearthed years afterwards by his 

 son, and presented to the French Academy. 

 Bouillard's views were also disinterred by Aubertin, 

 and in the year 1861 were brought by him before 

 the notice of the Anthropological Society of Paris. 

 Broca, who was present at the meeting, had a 



