SCIENTIFIC SUMMAKY. 
99 
same results. The explanation which M. Nothnagel regards as the most 
probable is, that the animal has no ideal representation, or only an 
incomplete one, of the position of the extremity ; in other words, there is 
partial paralysis of the muscular sense. He finds, however, from other 
experiments, that there is no very strict localisation of mental functions in 
definite centres situated in the cortex of the cerebrum. Nothnagel finds 
lesion of the lenticular nucleus is always followed by motor paralysis, but 
not necessarily by sensory. Injection into a definite point at the anterior 
and inner part of the corpus striatum (nucleus caudatus) gave the following 
results : — For the first two or three minutes, or even longer, the animal 
remained quiet, bub gave the impression of being conscious. Then, without 
the slightest external irritation, it began to leap either straight forward or 
performed the mouvement de manege. It made from four to eight leaps, 
then sat still for a few seconds, then leaped again, and so on, the movements 
being always hasty, the 'pause shorter and shorter, till at length the 
movements became continuous, and after five to eight minutes it fell over 
on its side, the legs moving violently. In the course of a quarter or half 
an hour the animal was quite exhausted, and lay apathetic. The point of 
the brain which when irritated produced these effects Nothnagel calls the 
nodus cursorius. 
Goitre Caused in the French Army by Pressure on the Throat. — A long 
paper having been recently published, showing that goitre was epidemic, 
Baron Larrey states ( Comptes Rendus , September 29th) that he has fre- 
quently found young soldiers suffer from an enlargement of the thyroid 
gland and neighbouring tissues, owing to pressure of the shirt-button, coat- 
collar, and clasp of the chapote ; a purely mechanical cause. On replacing 
the collar with a cravat the glandular swelling disappeared. He is un- 
willing to accept the term epidemic goitre for an affection at once simple and 
easily remedied, and which he calls thyreoiditis ; and he suggests the 
possibility of the mechanical cause acting in the St.-Etienne case. 
Theory of the Pulse in Normal and Abnormal States . — The u Chemical 
News,” in one of its October numbers, gives the following account of 
M. Bouilland’s views, lately laid before the French Academy : — The 
author distinguishes four periods in each 11 arterial revolution,” or the 
changes occurring from commencement of one pulsation to that of the next. 
Of the two shocks the first (known as the pulse ) is produced by the ven- 
tricular systole of the heart ; the second results from systole of the arteries 
(which are passive in the first, active in the second). These two alternating 
shocks constitute the normal dicrotism , of which the abnormal dicrotism is 
merely the intensifying, simple or double, that is, affecting either one shock 
or both. In opposition to Harvey and other physiologists, the author 
supposes in the arteries an impulsive force, without which the transport of 
the blood into all parts of the body could not be effected. The co-ordinated 
movements of arteries and heart are ruled by ganglionic innervation, but the 
precise situation of the co-ordinating nerve-centre has yet to be discovered. 
