Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.

the nitrogenous materials are alkaline, and the nerves are neutral. The voltaic arrangement of the human body consists in animal membranes and fluids, with nerve-fibres for connecting; and the result is, the most exquisite self-sustaining battery ar- rangement, that yields a kind of constant voltaic electricity, modified by vitality. It was Philippo Pacini, an Italian physi- cian, who, in 1830, first described nervc-corpuscules, or appen- dages to the cutaneous nerves, as found particularly at the wrist, elbow, thigh, and intercostal spaces, and also in the solar and sacral plexuses. These Pacinian corpuscules were, possibly, noticed as early as 1741 by Lehmann, which he termed papilla? nervosa. In each of these corpuscules there is a terminal nerve filament, and also an arterial radical. They doubtless have to do with the electro-nervous battery, as a whole ; but what their office is, is not fairly known. (See pp. 222, 264.) It is known, moreover, that minute cells are found throughout the gray matter of the brain, which may be supposed to be the active portion, and possibly the central poles, of the electro- nerve power. Here the requisites of arterial blood and of nerves are supplied in the greatest abundance, so that the brain is literally nothing but nerve fibres, blood vessels, or nerve tubes. In fact, the whole of the white layers — as, for instance, the corpora striata. — are mainly nerve fibrils ; while the gray portion is mostly supplied with blood, and that in a truly won- derful structure. The mechanism is here complex ; yet is it still more and more beautiful and wonderful every step we take in understanding it as a means to an end, designed and built by the all-wise Architect as the nicest of his material works. There are strong reasons for believing, says Alfred Smee, in his " Electro-Biology," that the brain is a double organ, and that the two impressions—when received on each side of the body or limbs — give but one idea to the mind. To preserve this doubleness of the apparatus — that is to say, to have the action in duplicate — each nerve fibre must be connected with a cor- responding nerve fibre on the opposite side of the body. Thus two distinct systems of brain apparatus are formed, of which one is exactly the duplicate of the other; so that any action on