of the chest in breathing, speaking, and expression . 303 
made to produce convulsions in the muscles they supply, 
after the other nerves are dead to the application of stimuli. 
In disease, during the oppression of the mental faculties, and 
on the approach of death, we witness these nerves, and the 
muscles put into operation by them, continuing their func- 
tions, v/hen in other respects the body is dead. This circum* 
stance, so familiar to the medical observer, might have led to 
the conclusion to which we have arrived, more laboriously 3 
through anatomical investigations : that there are a great 
many muscles extended over the body, and which perform 
the common offices under the will, which are occasionally 
drawn into combination with the muscles of respiration, and 
are held in relation to the vital functions by a distinct system 
of nerves, and that these nerves have a centre and a source 
of power, different from that of the voluntary nerves. 
These nerves, so peculiar in relation and function, are dif- 
ferently influenced by disease from the other division of the 
nervous system. Their functions are left entire when the 
voluntary nerves have ceased to act, and they are sometimes 
strangely disordered, while the mind is entire in all its offices, 
and the voluntary operations perfect. In tetanus the voluntary 
nerves are under influence, and the voluntary motions locked 
up in convulsions ; in hydrophobia the respiratory system is 
affected ; and hence the convulsions of the throat, the paroxysms 
of suffocation, the speechless agony, and the excess of expres- 
sion in the whole frame, while the voluntary motions are free. 
The confusion between vital and voluntary nerves, the com- 
bining the par vagum and sympathetic nerves together, and 
the exclusion of the portio dura of the 7th nerve, the spinal 
accessory nerve, and the external thoracic nerve, from their 
