i8 6 Mr. Cruikshank’s Experiments on the Nerves] 
same time, slow, but not feeble. He shut his eyelids when 
they were touched ; shut his mouth on its being opened ; he 
raised his head a little, but as he had not the use of the muscles 
which fix the chest, he did it with a jerk. Mr. Hunter saw 
him again between four and five o’clock in the morning ; his 
respirations were then five in a minute, the heart beating ex- 
ceeding slow and weak. We suppose he died about six in the 
morning, having survived the operation sixteen hours. This 
experiment 1 made from the suggestion of Mr. Hunter, with 
a view to obviate the objections raised against the reason- 
ing drawn from the three first experiments. It was urged, 
that though by these experiments I had deprived the thoracic 
and abdominal viscera of their ordinary connection with the 
brain, yet, as the intercostals communicated with all the spinal 
nerves, some influence might be derived from the brain in this 
way. This experiment removed also the spinal nerves, and 
consequently this objection. 
As I found, by the two last experiments, that dividing the 
spinal marrow in the lower part of the neck did not imme- 
diately kill, although instant death was universally known to 
be the consequence of dividing it in the upper part of the neck, 
I expressed my surprise to Mr. Hunter, that the spinal mar- 
row should, according to modern theory, be so irritable in the 
one place, and so much less so in the other. 
He told me, that from the time he first observed, that men 
who had the spinal marrow destroyed in the lower part of the 
neck lived some days after it, he had established an opinion, 
that animals, who had the spinal marrow wounded in the up- 
per part of the neck, did not die from the mere wound ; but 
that in dividing it so high, we destroyed all the nerves of the 
