42 THOMPSON YATES LABORATORIES REPORT 
not pass awa)' if the animal were to live healthily for any number of years. The most favourable 
time for the examination of the independent capabilities of the spinal cord is that when the sum 
of ' shock ' and ' isolation-dystrophy ' together is of smallest amount. That time, compounded 
as it is of two such variable factors, is itself extraordinarily variable. In result of spinal transection 
in monkey, I am sure that ' shock ' lasts longer, and that ' isolation-dystrophy ' comes on earlier 
than in the other animal types commonly observed in the laboratory. It is the conjunction of the 
periods of these two phenomena which renders so difficult and so largely defeats attempts at 
observations on proper spinal reactions of the monkey. If the overlap of the two is great, then 
no spinal reflexes, or only the merest traces of them, may be observable. In man it is only natural 
to suppose — and what clinical experience I have had access to strengthens me in the belief — that 
even more than in monkey will ' shock ' be protracted, and ' isolation-dystrophy ' speedy and 
severe. The observations of Bastian,* BowIby,t and Bruns,J. teach us that the clinical picture of 
the effects of total transverse lesions of the human spinal cord does not accord in the way that 
medical text-books have been wont to describe with the long-known results obtained from the 
transected cord by the physiologist. Older physiological experiments are, however, not based on 
nervous systems so approximate to the human as is that of Macacus, Cercocebus, &c. Of these 
latter I would say that their condition after spinal transection commonly resembles in its features, in 
the most striking manner, the condition of spinal depression observed after spinal translesion in 
man, and considered by Bastian to be the typical status. 
My results on monkeys bear out strikingly and fully what Bastian describes as the typical 
condition in man, after complete transverse destruction across the cord. The chief difference is 
that in the monkey in most cases — partly, perhaps, because the lesion is more localized by 
experimental infliction than by accidental — the depression is not so severe. For instance, the 
knee-jerk, which disappears almost immediately after the transection, returns usually in a week or 
ten days,§ — often, however, not for three weeks ; occasionally, on the other hand, in ten minutes. 
The great motor organ — the skeletal musculature — is at the command of the sense-organs. 
Not only is it actuated by contact sensations evoked in the neural system of the individual by the 
tangible quality of the circumambient environment; each light that causes the animal to move, 
each sound, each odour, shows how the motor machine lies at the behest of the great sense-organs 
of the head. Now these latter are broadly distinguishable from the sense-organs of the trunk 
inasmuch as they subserve sense possessing the quale of 'projection.' For each individual 
creature the material universe is thus separated into two parts, the part that is *me,' and the part 
that is 'not me.' I think it was Lotze who said that doubtless to the trodden worm, of these two 
halves the trodden 'me' shall surely appear the greater. By a high spinal transection the splendid 
motor machinery of the vertebrate is practically as a whole and at one stroke severed from all the 
universe except that fraction the 'material me.' The deeper depression of reaction into which 
the higher animal as contrasted with the lower sinks when made 'spinal,' appears to me significant 
of this, that in the higher types, more than in the lower, the great projecting senses actuate the 
* ' Medico-Chirurgical Transactions,' London, 1891. f Ibid. 
\ ' Neurologisches Centralblatt,' Herlin, 1893. § ' Foster's Journal of Physiology,' vol. xiii, 1892. 
