THE INJURY CURRENT OF NERVE 
265 
through the air being conveyed not by particles of the air but by charged particles 
discharged from the conductor, and the real resistance of the air gap is not, therefore, 
open to calculation. 
The authors believe that a high general conductivity is revealed in the nerve by 
this method, since, in their opinion, the method eliminates all error due to polarization. 
It must be admitted that such a revelation would place the longitudinal polarization 
of nerve in a position of extreme importance as an agent capable, under ordinary 
circumstances, of masking 90 per cent, of the electrical conductivity of the nerve. This 
extreme value of the longitudinal polarization has no direct evidence in support of it, 
and all the available evidence (as that obtained in the last section) points to the 
opposite conclusion, that polarization, though characteristically present and or 
importance, is not able to mask more than a fraction (less, say, than one-fifth) of the gross 
conductivity, and adds but a small fractional addition to the measurable resistance. 
The difference found between nerve and the other tissues must have some 
reason, even if this is not expressible in the terms chosen by the authors, and there 
seems the remote possibility that the method has revealed the possession by the 
nerve of extremely fine paths of high specific conductivity. 
