And even HALLER, some twenty years after SWEDENBORG had written his works on the brain, was still of a similar opinion, as is evident from a quotation which I shall here bring forward, in which he emphasizes that neither perceptions nor the impulses to motion arise in the cortex of the cerebrum, but in the medullary substance: ›Non ergo in cerebri cortice sensus sedes erit, aut plena causae muscularis motus origo: eritque utraque in medulla cerebri, & cerebelli.› (ALB. V. HALLER: ›Elementa physiologiae›, Lausannae, 1762, Tom. IV., p. 392). But when even HALLER would not attribute the soul’s activity to the cortex, what then can have led SWEDENBORG to such a thought? In order to clear up this question let us first examine the _anatomical literature_ before SWEDENBORG’s time. And then we find that the BARTHOLINS had already in a kind of way associated this branch of the soul’s activity with the cerebral cortex, because they supposed that the ›_spiritus animalis_›, (the ›spirits of life›), _was contained in the cortex for the sensory functions_, just as it was conserved in the medullary substance for the motor functions.[61] And THOMAS WILLIS considered that the _›spiritus animalis› was generated in the cerebral cortex_, but afterwards underwent proper elaboration and distribution in the medulla of the cerebrum; and that the memory had its seat in the cerebral cortex.[62] And MALPIGHI (1628-1694) had expressed the surmise, that the minute _cortical elements_, so particularly described by him, which correspond to what we now call the nerve-cells of the cortex, were small glands, ›glandulæ›, whose function was to _prepare a substance which_, conveyed through the nerves, _calls forth perceptions_.[63] It had also been shown by the researches of MALPIGHI that these ›glandulæ› put forth a vessel-like fibre, which continued into the cerebral medulla; and that this medulla for the greater part consisted of such fibres or vessels.[64] In how far these structures were ›fibres› or ›vessels›, and whether they proceeded from (›oriuntur›) or terminated in (›desinunt›) the small cortical elements, MALPIGHI leaves undecided. And when BOERHAAVE afterwards in his lectures on the brain describes these structures, he still depicts them as the finest tiny canals, which take up the ›spiritus animalis›, pressed into them from the cortex, and transport it down to the medulla oblongata, whence it is afterwards, by means of the nerves, distributed to the different parts of the body. This ›spiritus› BOERHAAVE describes as elaborated in the cortex, ›fabrica mirifica corticis praeparatus›.[65]