While the papers refused a place in the “Philosophical Transactions” were going through the press, to appear as a “Critical and Experimental Essay on the Circulation of the Blood,” a serious accident happened to a portion of the manuscript. It was sent from time to time by stage-coach to Messrs. Seeley, printers, at Thames Ditton, and on the evening of William IV.’s coronation a packet containing the only record of a considerable series of experiments was stolen from the coach. This most serious loss could only be repaired by a repetition of the experiments, which Dr. Hall at once set about with most Christian equanimity. Early in 1832 Marshall Hall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the same year he published another paper on the Effects of Loss of Blood, in the “Medico-Chirurgical Transactions.” The original papers on practical medicine which he produced during this period are too numerous to be mentioned here. We must hasten to give an account of Marshall Hall’s great researches on the reflex functions of the spinal cord. It was while he was examining the circulation of the blood in the newt’s lung that Marshall Hall noted the fact from which his great discoveries arose. The newt’s head had been cut off; thus its life, in the ordinary acceptation, was destroyed. The tail was afterwards separated. “I now touched the external integument with the point of a needle; it moved with energy, assuming various curvilinear forms! What was the nature of this phenomenon? I had not touched a muscle; I had not touched a muscular nerve; I had not touched the spinal marrow. I had touched a cutaneous nerve. That the influence of this touch was exerted through the spinal marrow was demonstrated by the fact that the phenomenon ceased when the spinal marrow was destroyed. It was obvious that the same influence was reflected along the muscular nerve to the muscles, for the phenomenon again ceased when these nerves were divided. And thus we had the most perfect evidence of a reflex, or diastaltic, or diacentric action.”