We have discovered, by half a century of careful study in the hospital and in the sick-room, not only that the nerve-tissues are usually poisoned by defect of other tissues of the body, but that they are among the very last of the body-stuffs to succumb to an intoxication. The complications of a given disease involving the nervous system are almost invariably the last of all to appear. This is one of the things that has given nervous diseases such a bad name for unmanageableness and incurableness, and that for years made us regard their study as so nearly hopeless, so far as any helpful results were concerned. When a disease has, so to speak, soaked into the inmost core of the nerve-fibre, it has got a hold which it will take months and even years to dislodge. And before your remedies can reach it, it will often have done irreparable damage. An illustration of the care taken to spare the nervous system is furnished by its behavior in starvation. If a man or an animal has almost died of starvation, the tissues of the body will be found to have been wasted in very varying degrees, the fat, of course, most of all; in fact this will have almost entirely disappeared, all but three per cent. Then come the liver and great glands, which will have shrunk about sixty per cent; then the muscles, thirty per cent; then the heart and blood-vessels. Last of all, the nervous system, which will scarcely have wasted to any appreciable degree. In fact, it is an obvious instance of jettison on the part of the body, throwing overboard those tissues which it could most easily spare, and hanging on like grim death to those which were absolutely essential to its continued existence, viz., the heart and the nervous system. To use a cannibalistic and more correct illustration, it is killing and eating the less useful and valuable members of its family, in order that their flesh may keep alive the two or three most indispensable. Another illustration is the actual behavior of the nerve-stuff in disease. This is most clearly shown in those clear-cut disturbances which are definitely known to be due to a specific infection; in other words, invasion of the body by a disease-organism, or germ.