Such are the phenomena commonly observed, and such the impressions which
one naturally receives. Certain general conclusions follow irresistibly.
First of all the following:
_The acts of all the centres involve the use of the same muscles._ When
a brainless frog's hind-leg wipes the acid, he calls into play all the
leg-muscles which a frog with his full medulla oblongata and cerebellum
uses when he turns from his back to his belly. Their contractions are,
however, _combined_ differently in the two cases, so that the results
vary widely. We must consequently conclude that specific arrangements of
cells and fibres exist in the cord for wiping, in the medulla for
turning over, etc. Similarly they exist in the thalami for jumping over
seen obstacles and for balancing the moved body; in the optic lobes for
creeping backwards, or what not. But in the hemispheres, since the
presence of these organs _brings no new elementary form of movement_
with it, but only _determines differently the occasions_ on which the
movements shall occur, making the usual stimuli less fatal and
machine-like, we need suppose no such machinery _directly_ coördinative
of muscular contractions to exist. We may rather assume, when the
mandate for a wiping-movement is sent forth by the hemispheres, that a
current goes straight to the wiping-arrangement in the spinal cord,
exciting this arrangement as a whole. Similarly, if an intact frog
wishes to jump, all he need do is to excite from the hemispheres the
jumping-centre in the thalami or wherever it may be, and the latter will
provide for the details of the execution. It is like a general ordering
a colonel to make a certain movement, but not telling him how it shall
be done.
_The same muscle, then, is repeatedly represented at different heights_;
and at each it enters into a different combination with other muscles to
coöperate in some special form of concerted movement. At each height the
movement is discharged by some particular form of sensorial stimulus,
whilst the stimuli which discharge the hemispheres would seem not so
much to be elementary sorts of sensation, as groups of sensations
forming determinate _objects_ or _things_.
=The Pigeon's Lower Centres.=--The results are just the same if, instead
of a frog, we take a pigeon, cut out his hemispheres carefully and wait
till he recovers from the operation. There is not a movement natural to
him which this brainless bird cannot execute; he seems, too, after some
days to execute movements from some inner irritation, for he moves
spontaneously. But his emotions and instincts exist no longer. In
Schrader's striking words:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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