The human brain : its structure, physiology and diseases. With a description of the typical forms of brain in the animal kingdom / by Samuel Solly.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The human brain : its structure, physiology and diseases. With a description of the typical forms of brain in the animal kingdom / by Samuel Solly. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    63/736 (page 35)
    / CYCLO-GANGLIONIC SYSTEM. 35 acting upon these impressions, showing thereby a conscious- ness of their existence, is pecuHar to animals. All true physiologists, even from the time of Aristotle, have observed more or less accurately the distinction between these two classes of phenomena, and arranged them accord- ingly. Aristptle conceived that they might be classified imder three heads,—vital, natural, and animal; the first two comprehending those which we now combine under the head of vegetable life. Galen adopted the same arrangement, but added the hypothesis that these functions were superintended or con- trolled in their operation by presiding spirits; something in the same way that some physiologists of the present day believe in the existence of a single vital princijple, whose office it is to effect all the various vital phenomena which are presented to our observation by living beings. Bichat arranged the functions, like many of his predeces- sors, under two heads; but instead of referring the power, which appears to regulate and preside over these phenomena, to some mysterious spirit, he considered it to be dependent for its very existence on the nervous system; and this led him to divide the nervous material into two systems, the one of which he called the nervous system of organic, perhaps better caUed vegetative life, and the other of animal life. The first of these systems in man was formerly designated the spnjjathetic nerve, from a belief that it arose from the brain in a similar manner to the cerebral nerves in general. Its title of sympathetic was owing to the idea that the sympathy which exists between all the vital organs was dependent for its existence on this nerve. The idea that it arises from the brain is erroneous; for it differs from the cerebral nerves as completely as the brain and spinal cord themselves do from the nerves which arise from them. And the notion being rejected, it has since been called the gan- glionic system,—a name which I think objectionable, in as much as it might lead the student to imagine that those nodules of neurine called ganglia were peculiar to this system, which as he advances in his studies he would find to be erroneous. It has appeared to me, that in describing this portion of D 2