GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 
It is impossible, in considering the electrical phenomena accompanying manifes- 
tations of change in the body, to neglect the primary importance of processes of 
diffusion in their production : and in no case is such a statement more apposite than 
when it is brought to bear upon electrical phenomena determined by injury. For 
the quantitative distribution of electrolytes in the tissues is notoriously by no means 
uniform, and the tendency to uniformity which follows injury is necessarily the cause 
of their redistribution. 
It, therefore, follows that in the case of any remarkable electrical phenomenon, 
attributable to 'injury,' the part taken in its production by this redistribution of 
electrolytes must necessarily be examined. Where this enquiry has not been elaborately 
made, there is reason to undertake it, even if some other cause has, upon apparently 
adequate grounds, been previously assigned to the phenomenon. 
When, as in the case of the injury current of nerve, the pursuit of the cause has 
been abandoned, and an agreement has been come to, to cover the abandonment by a 
phrase ; then, such a course can only be justified upon the grounds that the phenomenon 
is of very minor importance, and is better disregarded whilst more fundamental facts are 
being observed and investigated. 
In the case of the injury current of nerve the abandonment has been definite, 
the justification has not been pleaded ; since under whatever phrases the phenomenon 
and its causation have been concealed, it is a matter of common opinion that this 
phenomenon may be a crude, stationary, and therefore useful, instance of the 
travelling phenomenon of the nervous impulse. 
The lack of justification is not only made evident by such an important con- 
sideration, but even better so by another still more important one ; for the evidence 
is by no means conclusive, is even fallacious when apparently most definite, which 
has been used to prove that the injury current is not the outcome of conditions 
pre-existing in the nerve fibre. 
As long as it remains possible to regard this phenomenon as due to previously 
existent structures newly arranged in regard to one another by the process of injury ; 
so long must it be regarded as probably a most important guide to the differences of 
structure between the component parts of the nerve ; since such differences can be 
estimated by use of the electrical phenomenon as an index, and the new arrangement 
consequent upon injury is capable of being directly studied. 
There is no justification, therefore, for an abandonment of the enquiry into the 
causation of this phenomenon. 
