82 Dr. Philip’s experiments to ascertain the principle 
both in the warm and cold blooded animals, and found their 
excitability unimpaired. It is not their power, but the sti- 
mulus which excites them, that is lost in apoplexy. In this 
disease, the heart continues to contract, because its stimulus is 
still supplied ; the muscles of voluntary motion cease to con- 
tract, because their stimulus is withdrawn. 
By the foregoing experiments we arrive at the conclusion 
of Haller, that the heart and other muscles possess an exci- 
tability independent of the nervous system ; but we are car- 
ried a step farther, and taught that they are all equally capable 
of being stimulated through this system, by which the great 
objections to Haller’s doctrine are removed. We may, I 
think, trace the subject still farther. It has been shown by 
direct experiment by M. le Gallois, that the spinal marrow is 
capable of performing its functions independently of the brain, 
yet, as has just been observed, the spinal marrow may be 
influenced through the brain. Thus the excitability of the 
spinal marrow bears the same relation to the brain, which that 
of the muscles bears to the spinal marrow and its nerves, and 
I would add all nerves distributed to muscles, some of which 
arise from the brain, but seem to bear precisely the same 
relation to the sensorium with those which arise from the spi- 
nal marrow. Even M. le Gallois, although his experiments 
lead to an opposite conclusion, observes, that the brain seems 
to act on the spinal marrow as the latter does on the parts it 
animates. We know the peculiar office of the brain, by ob- 
serving what functions are lost by its removal, the sensorial 
functions. The nervous, then, obeys the sensorial system, in 
the same way in which the muscular obeys the nervous system, 
but as the muscular system has an existence independent of the 
