NERVE-CELLS IN THE MAMMALIAN SPINAL-CORD. 
35 
adding that snch cells probably exist not merely in the lumbar region but in other 
regions as well. My own preparations confirm the description of Schiefferdecker. 
In them the cells are like arrow-beads in shape ; one of the cell-processes, occasionally 
two, disappears into fibre-bundles in a direction toward the adjacent grey born, and 
one process is directed toward the bottom of the ventral fissure, as if to pass with 
medullated nerve-fibres into the white commissure. One cell process may project, as, 
for instance, in fig. 2, in a median direction, neither toward the grey cornu nor the 
white commissure. This may pass into a fibre-bundle lying further ventrally than that 
which contains the parent cell, and in that may turn either toward the grey cornu, or, 
and more probably, toward the white commissure. It is to be remembered, liowever, 
that the direction at first taken by it is the same as that of numerous bundles of fine 
medullated fibres winch radiate into the anterior white column from the ventral part 
of the mesial border of the ventral cornu, as if to reach the angle of white matter 
forming the lip of the ventral fissure. I have found the cells in the cervical as well 
in the lumbar remon of the cord. It is difficult not to think that these isolated cells 
o 
as in the anterior column are connected with the fibres among which they lie. Most of 
these appear certainly to pass between the mesial portion of the ventral horn and the 
opposite side of the cord in the white commissure. In bundles starting from the 
cornu further ventrally, it is not usual in one and the same section to see that the 
bundles pass actually into the commissure, although they slant in the required 
direction. It is possible that they take a longitudinal course within the white 
column. The view of Bidder ''' and his pupilst that the fibres of the white commissure 
run to nerve-cells in the ventral cornu, although opposed by Stilling^ and untrue 
in the sense in which Geelach§ advocated it, has much in its favour. In the white 
commissure are collected together fibres from and for manifold end-stations, and that 
some of these fibres are of the kind described by Bidder is rendered all the more 
probable by the presence of the outlying cells above-mentioned. 
Out-lying Ganglion-Cells in the Lateral Column. 
The remarkable group of nerve-cells discovered by Berger || in the cord of Alligator 
and allied forms still remains, so far as I am aware, an unexplained fact. I have, as 
already stated, never seen any unequivocal trace of it in the Mammalian cord. It may 
be that a vestige of it does really exist in the shape of a thickened rib in the sub-pial 
In a letter to R. Wagner in 1854. See Wagner’s ‘Neurolog. Untersucliungen,’ 1854. 
t Kupffer, ‘ De Medullae Spinalis Textura in Ranis,’ 1854, p. 30; Owsjannikow, ‘ Disq. Microsc. 
de Med. Spin, textur. imprimis in Piscibus fact.,’ 1854, p. 36. 
I ‘ Neue Untersuch. ii. d. Bau des Riickenmarks,’ 1859; also Froiimann, ‘ Untersuch. ii. d. Normal. 
Anat. des Riickenmar-ks,’ 1864 and 1867. 
§ Stricker’s ‘ Handbucb,’ vol. 2. 
II “iJeber ein eigenthiimlicbes Riickenmarks band einiger Reptilien und Amphibien.” ‘ Sitzungsb. 
der Mat. Class, der Kaiserlich. Akademie zu Wien,’ Feb., 1878. 
