250 
BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
supplied by a ramus lateralis accessorius, or recurrent facial nerve, as in Ameiurus and 
the gadoid fishes, for this nerve, as has long been known, is absent in the cyprinoids. 
There is, however, in these fishes an intracranial anastomosis between the 
v+vn ganglionic complex and the ix+x complex, the composition of which has 
thu t s far remained unknown. This proves to be the recurrent branch of the facialis, 
carrying communis fibers from the geniculate ganglion into the trunk. The details 
of the peripheral distribution of these fibers have not been fully worked out, but the 
main path in the gold-fish is as follows: 
The geniculate ganglion of the facialis is clearly separable from all other 
ganglionic masses of the trigemino-facial complex and is composed of two portions, 
each of large size. The more dorsal portion corresponds to the greater part of the 
ganglion in other teleosts and distributes its fibers chiefly by way of the infraorbital 
trunk. The more ventral portion sends cephalad a very large palatine nerve, and 
caudad a still larger nerve which represents morphologically, though not topograph- 
ically, the r. recurrens facialis of the siluroids, etc., or the facial root of the r. lateralis 
accessorius as found in the cod. 
This nerve passes back along the lateral side of the great auditory root and at 
the level of the superficial origin of the ix nerve it divides into several strands, one 
of which passes dorsal ly of the ix root, the others ventral ly. These latter, however, 
pass upward so as to lie, farther back, dorsally of all of the vagus roots except that 
of the lateralis branch of the vagus. All of these communis fibers now join them- 
selves to the r. lateralis vagi and, passing through the ganglion of the latter nerve, 
both components enter the body of the fish bound up in a single nerve trunk in 
which the fine communis fibers are for a time completely surrounded by the coarse 
lateralis fibers. The communis fibers go off in successive branches along with 
lateralis fibers. The details of the distribution have not been worked out, though I 
think it would not be difficult to do so with the material at hand. It is highly 
probable that the communis fibers are for the terminal buds sparsely distributed 
over the skin of the body and that the terminal buds of the trunk are all innervated 
from these communis fibers in the r. lateralis vagi, just as the buds in the skin of 
the head are innervated by other communis fibers from the geniculate ganglion of 
the facialis, an arrangement substantially identical in morphological plan with that 
of the siluroid fishes. 
The conditions here, so far as studied, confirm essentially the conjectures to 
which I was led from a study of the literature (Herrick, ’99, p. 400), and accord so 
completely with the morphological interpretation there proposed that we merely 
refer the reader to that passage in the Menidia paper. 
FUNCTIONS OF TERMINAL BUDS. 
EXPERIMENTS ON SILUROID FISHES. 
The cat-fish {Ameiurus nebulosus ) upon which this series of experiments was 
conducted (except a few experiments specifically designated) were hatched in the 
open at Granville in the spring of 1901. In October of that same year they were 
taken to the laboratory and kept through the following winter in tanks. Microscopic 
examination of the skin and barblets shows that their skin and cutaneous sense orvans 
