[4] It should be said that this particular cut commonly proves fatal. The text refers to the rare cases which survive.
[5] I confine myself to the frog for simplicity's sake. In higher animals, especially the ape and man, it would seem as if not only determinate combinations of muscles, but limited groups or even single muscles could be innervated from the hemispheres.
[6] I hope that the reader will take no umbrage at my so mixing the physical and mental, and talking of reflex acts and hemispheres and reminiscences in the same breath, as if they were homogeneous quantities and factors of one causal chain. I have done so deliberately; for although I admit that from the radically physical point of view it is easy to conceive of the chain of events amongst the cells and fibres as complete in itself, and that whilst so conceiving it one need make no mention of 'ideas,' I yet suspect that point of view of being an unreal abstraction. Reflexes in centres may take place even where accompanying feelings or ideas guide them. In another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoning this common-sense position; meanwhile language lends itself so much more easily to the mixed way of describing, that I will continue to employ the latter. The more radical-minded reader can always read 'ideational process' for 'idea.'
[7] I shall call it hereafter for shortness 'the Meynert scheme;' for the child-and-flame example, as well as the whole general notion that the hemispheres are a supernumerary surface for the projection and association of sensations and movements natively coupled in the centres below, is due to Th. Meynert, the Austrian anatomist. For a popular account of his views, see his pamphlet 'Zur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues,' Vienna, 1874. His most recent development of them is embodied in his 'Psychiatry,' a clinical treatise on diseases of the forebrain, translated by B. Sachs, New York, 1885.
[8] Geschichte des Materialismus, 2d ed., ii, p. 345.
[9] West Riding Asylum Reports, 1876, p. 267.
[10] For a thorough discussion of the various objections, see Ferrier's 'Functions of the Brain,' 2d ed., pp. 227-234, and François-Franck's 'Leçons sur les Fonctions Motrices du Cerveau' (1887), Leçon 31. The most minutely accurate experiments on irritation of cortical points are those of Paneth, in Pflüger's Archiv, vol 37, p. 528.—Recently the skull has been fearlessly opened by surgeons, and operations upon the human brain performed, sometimes with the happiest results. In some of these operations the cortex has been electrically excited for the purpose of more exactly localizing the spot, and the movements first observed in dogs and monkeys have then been verified in men.
[11] J. Loeb: Beiträge zur Physiologie des Grosshirns; Pflüger's Archiv, xxxix, 293. I simplify the author's statement.
[12] Goltz: Pflüger's Archiv, xlii, 419.