And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The dusty way to death.”
But not to the end of time shall it be. The nineteenth century has seen the glimmering dawn of the true civilization. How it came, what it is, and what it is destined to realize, the Journal of Man will attempt to show.
Synopsis of Cerebral Science.* * Copyrighted, 1887, by Joseph Rodes Buchanan.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL PLAN OF THE BRAIN.
The brain the centre of life—Its organs not distinctly separated—Its double functions and degrees of energy—Difficulty of nomenclature, chiefly basilar—The pathognomic law—Its application to the brain—The four cardinal directions and four divisions, the coronal, basilar, anterior, and occipital—Their effects on the character and constitution—The method of locating organs—The four groups—The law of antagonism—Its certainty and necessity—Difficulty of expressing it—Correspondence of the English language and the brain—Its limits—Radiating groups of organs—Contrasts of development.
The details of cerebral science will be much more easily understood if we begin with a comprehensive view of the entire plan of the functions and structure.
The brain is distinguished from all other organs by being the source of commands which all other organs obey, and being the immediate seat of the soul, which has no knowledge of anything occurring in the body, until a message or impression has reached it through nervous channels. The compression of all the nerves before they enter the cranium and connect with the brain would deprive us of all knowledge of the body, and of all sensations or perceptions; and the compression of the brain itself would render us totally unconscious, as if dead,—incapable of either thought or action. Manifestly, therefore, all the powers of the soul are lodged in and exercised through the brain; and as all distinct nerve structures have essentially different functions, and every different function requires a different structure, it is obvious that the vast variety of our psychic faculties, intellectual, emotional, sensitive, passional, and physiological, requires a corresponding multiplicity in the nervous apparatus; and this incalculably great multiplicity we find in the brain.
The crude, mechanical idea that all the organs of the brain should be distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are indistinguishable from the sensitive.