tance transmits sensitive impressions and
muscular stimulation. The oblique ascending and descending fibres from
the posterior nerve-roots, joining the "longitudinal columns of the
cornua," account for the results of Brown-Sequard's sections of the
posterior columns. The physiological experimenter has also made it
evident that the decussation of the conductors of sensitive impressions
has its seat in the spinal core, and not in the encephalon, as had been
supposed. Not less remarkable than these results are the facts, which I
with others of my audience have had the opportunity of observing, as
shown by M. Brown-Sequard, of the artificial production of epilepsy in
animals by injuring the spinal cord, and the induction of the paroxysm by
pinching a certain portion of the skin. I would also call the student's
attention to his account of the relations of the nervous centres to
nutrition and secretion, the last of which relations has been made the
subject of an extended essay by our fellow countryman, Dr. H. F. Campbell
of Georgia.

The physiology of the spinal cord seems a simple matter as you study it
in Longet. The experiments of Brown-Sequard have shown the problem to be
a complex one, and raised almost as many doubts as they have solved
questions; at any rate, I believe all lecturers on physiology agree that
there is no part of their task they dread so much as the analysis of the
evidence relating to the special offices of the different portions of the
medulla spinalis. In the brain we are sure that we do not know how to
localize functions; in the spinal cord, we think we do know something;
but there are so many anomalies, and seeming contradictions, and sources
of fallacy, that beyond the facts of crossed paralysis of sensation, and
the conducting agency of the gray substance, I am afraid we retain no
cardinal principles discovered since the development of the reflex
function took its place by Sir Charles Bell's great discovery.

By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you will see that I am
obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,--out in the cold,--as not one of
the household of science. I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I
am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I love to amuse myself
in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he
discovers by his manipulations

"All that disgraced my betters met in me."

I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurzheim make a