The quality of the sensation complicates the question, however, for in some sensations, as bitter, sour, salt, and certain smells, the turning point of the dotted curve must be drawn very near indeed to the beginning of the scale. In the skin the painful quality soon becomes so intense as entirely to overpower the specific quality of the sort of stimulus. Heat, cold, and pressure are indistinguishable when extreme--we only feel the pain. The hypothesis of separate end-organs in the skin receives some corroboration from recent experiments, for both Blix and Goldscheider have found, along with their special heat-and cold spots, also special 'pain-spots' on the skin. Mixed in with these are spots which are quite feelingless. However it may stand with the terminal pain-spots, separate paths of _conduction_ to the brain, for painful and for merely tactile stimulations of the skin, are made probable by certain facts. In the condition termed _analgesia_, a touch is felt, but the most violent pinch, burn, or electric spark destructive of the tissue will awaken no sensation. This may occur in disease of the cord, by suggestion in hypnotism, or in certain stages of ether and chloroform intoxication. "In rabbits a similar state of things was produced by Schiff, by dividing the gray matter of the cord, leaving the posterior white columns intact. If, on the contrary, the latter were divided and the gray substance left, there was increased sensitiveness to pain, and possibly touch proper was lost. Such experiments make it pretty certain that when afferent impulses reach the spinal cord at any level and there enter its gray matter with the posterior root-fibres, they travel on in different tracts to conscious centres; the tactile ones coming soon out of the gray network and coursing on in a readily conducting white fibre, while the painful ones travel on farther in the gray substance. It is still uncertain if both impulses reach the cord in the same fibres. The gray network conducts nerve-impulses, but not easily; they tend soon to be blocked in it. A feeble (tactile) impulse reaching it by an afferent fibre might only spread a short way and then pass out into a single good conducting fibre in a white column, and proceed to the brain; while a stronger (painful) impulse would radiate farther in the gray matter, and perhaps break out of it by many fibres leading to the brain through the white columns, and so give rise to an incoördinate and ill-localized sensation. That pains are badly localized, and worse the more intense they are, is a well-known fact, which would thus receive an explanation."[26] Pain also gives rise to ill-coördinated movements of defence. The stronger the pain the more violent the start. Doubtless in low animals pain is almost the only stimulus; and we have preserved the peculiarity in so far that to-day it is the stimulus of our most energetic, though not of our most discriminating, reactions. * * * * *