According to Eckhard,[3] the phenomena of artificial glycosuria are irritative and not paralytic. This view he believes sustained by his own experiments, according to which if the splanchnics, through which {198} the vaso-motor nerves of the liver pass, are cut prior to the diabetic puncture, not only does this operation fail to produce glycosuria, but it even renders ineffectual the puncture itself as well as the section higher up. But Cyon and Aladoff remind us that it is not mere dilatation of the hepatic vessels, but increased velocity in the movement of the blood, which deranges the sugar-assimilating function and causes glucose to appear in the urine. The vaso-motor nerves of the intestinal blood-vessels also pass through the lower part of the sympathetic and the splanchnics, and section of the latter must cause these blood-vessels to dilate. Now, in rabbits, in which this experiment is usually performed, the digestive canal is very long, and the blood-vessels so capacious that when dilated they hold as much blood as all the rest of the vascular system together, so that when the lower sympathetic and splanchnics are cut, so much blood goes into the intestines that the increased velocity required in the blood-vessels of the liver to produce glycosuria is impossible. But if the vessels of the liver be first dilated by puncturing the floor of the fourth ventricle, section of the sympathetic or of the splanchnics may then be made without arresting the formation of sugar; whence it would appear that the glycogenic influence may still pass through the lower sympathetic and splanchnics. [Footnote 3: _Beiträge zur Anat. und Physiologie_, iv., 1859, p. 1; vii., 1873.] In view of the fact that Eckhard[4] has failed to confirm the results of Cyon and Aladoff, but has traced the glycogenic influence down the spinal cord as far as the fourth dorsal vertebra in rabbits, and even a little lower, and that Schiff[5] has shown that diabetes sometimes results after section of the anterior columns of the cord between the medulla and the fourth cervical vertebra, Dr. Brunton[6] suggests that the vaso-motor nerves of the liver may not always leave the spinal cord to join the sympathetic by the branches accompanying the vertebral artery, but sometimes pass farther down the cord, leaving it by the communicating branches to some of the dorsal ganglia, as indicated in Fig. 4. [Footnote 4: _Beiträge zur Anat. u. Physiologie_, viii., 1877, p. 79.] [Footnote 5: _Untersuchungen über Zuckerbildung in der Leber_, 1859, S. 108.] [Footnote 6: _Lectures on the Pathology and Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus_; reprinted from the _British Medical Journal_, 1874, p. 12.]