Physiology: The Science of the BodyMartin, Ernest G.
Science
Physiology: The Science of the Body
Martin, Ernest G.
Physiology
It will be seen that the cell body of the sensory cell appears to be off
on a little side branch. As a matter of fact, the branch is double, so
that when a nervous disturbance passing along from the sense organ comes
to the beginning of this branch it can pass up to the cell body and then
out from the cell body along the second part of the branch, and so along
the other part of the axon. This part of the axon is seen in the figure
to have several branches; these are really branches of protoplasm and
not separate axons coming off, as in the case of the nerve trunk. The
use of these branches we shall see in a moment. Also at the tips of
each branch there is a tiny feathering. We shall explain this
presently. Let us look first at the figure of the motor nerve cell. This
has a cell body and long axon, and, besides these, has a great many
short protoplasmic branches sticking out in all directions from the cell
body. Since a nervous disturbance to get from a sense organ to a muscle
has to pass over a sensory nerve cell, and also over a motor nerve cell,
evidently there will have to be some point at which it leaves the
sensory cell and gets into the motor. This is accomplished by having the
tiny feathering at the tip of the sensory cell interwoven with the fine
processes projecting from the body of the motor cell. This arrangement
we may call a nerve junction. In the whole body there are, of course,
millions of these nerve junctions.
[Illustration: MOTOR NERVE CELL
SENSORY NERVE CELL
(From Martin’s “Human Body”)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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