ire physical person by twelve pairs
of cranial or cerebral nerves, and by the spinal cord, which descends
from the base of the brain through a great foramen or opening midway
between the ears, and while passing down the spinal column gives off
thirty pairs of nerves.

The cranial nerves are all for the head, except the _pneumogastric_ or
lung-stomach nerve, which belongs to the organs of respiration, voice,
and digestion; and the spinal nerves are all for the body, except a
few which ramify in the neck and in the scalp.

The entire nervous system is so instantaneously prompt in conveying to
the brain the impressions which originate feeling, and in conveying
from the brain the nervous energies that produce voluntary motion and
modify all the processes of life, that we feel as if we had sensation
and volition in every part of the body; or, in other words, that our
conscious existence was in the body; but we rationally know that the
sensation and volition occur in the brain, for neither sensation nor
voluntary motion can occur if the nervous connection with the brain is
interrupted by compression and section, or if the brain itself be
sufficiently compressed. When the brain is exposed by an injury of the
cranium, the pressure of a finger suspends all consciousness and
volition, making a blank in the life of the individual.

Animal life resides in the nervous system alone, and its character is
proportioned to the development thereof, of which the brain is the
principal mass. A subordinate portion of the general life, however, is
in the nervous system of the body, and in proportion as the brain
declines in development the relative amount of psychic energy in the
body is greater. Thus the body of the alligator after decapitation is
capable of sensation and voluntary acts, such as pushing away an
offending body with its foot. The character of the life in the body is
explained by physiology and sarcognomy. Its universal presence is due
to the universal diffusion of the nervous system, of which the
accompanying figure, showing the location of the spinal cord and
spinal nerves, will give a proper conception. In this figure the
spinal cord, with its thirty pairs of nerves, eight cervical at the
neck, twelve dorsal in the back, five lumbar in the loins, and five or
six in the sacrum (between the hips), is seen descending from the base
of the brain below the cerebellum (which is rather too large in
engraving), and proceeding thro