678 
EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
error, an error which, more than once, has served to awaken, 
without cause, your just sensibility. How often has it hap¬ 
pened that your pity has been stirred at the description of 
phenomena, which possessed the semblance of manifes¬ 
tations of pain without the reality ? We speak of the reflex 
action , the consoling discovery of which, I again repeat, is 
entirely due to vivisection. 
The physiological denomination of reflex action of the 
nervous system, that peculiar faculty, in virtue of which 
muscular contractions, convulsious, motion in short, is wont 
to succeed to impression , without any perception or sense of 
the latter being conveyed to the brain—that is, without the 
possibility of any existence of pain. 
When such phenomena are exhibited upon the body of an 
animal entirely decapitated, it is impossible to deny that 
they must be accomplished without perception, since the 
acknowledged seat of perception is the encephalus, and* all 
communication is interrupted. In cases where they have 
been observed in the head when it has been already separated 
from the trunk, the demonstration of the fact, although less 
evident, perhaps, becomes not less certain notwithstanding, 
as it is known that every cause which suspends the flow of 
blood towards the brain immediately occasions the loss of 
sensibility. Therefore it is impossible to conceive the con¬ 
tinuance of perception, sensation, or pain there, where sensi¬ 
bility exists no longer. 
All phenomena of contraction of the eyelids, of the ears, 
of the lips, the movements of the eyeball, so frequently ob¬ 
served in the head after separation from the body, in the 
case of animals at the abattoirs, belong, therefore, solely to 
this reflex action, actly the same as the involuntary dropping 
of the eyelids, denominated winking, and various other in¬ 
voluntary motions of our organic life, to some of which had 
been already given, before their real nature had been ascer¬ 
tained, the name of “ sympathies.*’ 
We are only enabled to pass lightly over these divers 
subjects. To enumerate the list of services rendered to 
science bv vivisection, would be to retrace the whole history 
of the nervous s}'stem. We will say nothing of the fixed 
habitation which the practice has enabled us to bestow, in 
the divers portions of the sensorium, to the various functions 
over which each one maintains its especial government and 
rule—habitations established by the vivisections of MM. 
Flourens, Longet, &c., and which an endless number of pa¬ 
thologic examples have already tended to confirm. These 
facts permit us to determine, at least for the present, the 
