serves mental operations, and that there are no parts specially devoted to any particular functions. This has been recently expressed by so high an authority as Prof. Séquard. The idea rests chiefly on the numerous facts of disease with which we are acquainted. There are cases where extensive tracts of brain are destroyed by disease, or removed after a fracture, apparently with no result as regards the mind of the individual. Along with these facts we have others which are very curious, and which hardly seem to agree with this doctrine. One of these is, that when a certain part of the brain is diseased, in aphasia, the individual is unable to express himself in words. Other curious phenomena have been well described by Dr. Hughlings Jackson, viz., that certain tumors or pathological lesions in particular parts of the brain give rise, by the irritation which they keep up, to epileptiform convulsions of the whole of one side, or of the arm, or leg, or the muscles of the face; and, from studying the way in which these convulsions show themselves, he was able to localize very accurately the seat of the lesion.
The great difficulty in the study of the function of the brain has been, in the want of a proper method. When we study the function of a nerve, we make our experiments in two ways: In the first place, we irritate the nerve by scratching or by electricity, or by chemical action, and observe the effect; and, in the second place, we cut the nerve, and observe what is lost. In regard to the brain and nervous system, the method has been almost entirely, until recently, the method of section. It has been stated by physiologists that it is impossible to excite the brain into action by any stimulus that may be applied to it, even that of an electric current; they have, therefore, adopted the method of destroying parts of the brain. This method is liable to many fallacies. The brain is such a complex organ, that to destroy one part is necessarily to destroy many other parts, and the phenomena are so complex, that one cannot attribute their loss to the failure only of the parts which the physiologists have attempted to destroy.
About three years ago, two German physiologists, Fritsch and Hitzig, by passing galvanic currents through parts of the brains of dogs, obtained various movements of the limbs, such as adduction, flexion, and extension. They thus discovered an important method of research, but they did not pursue their experiments to the extent that they might have done, and perhaps did not exactly appreciate the significance of the facts at which they had arrived.
I was led to the experiments which I shall have to explain, by the effects of epilepsy and of chorea, which have been explained to depend upon irritation of parts of the brain. I endeavored to imitate the effects of disease on the lower animals, and determined to adopt the plan of stimulating the parts of the brain by electricity, after the manner described by Fritsch and Hitzig.
I operated on nearly a hundred animals of all classes—fish, frogs,
