the organ, after an operation, may suddenly bring back the appetite. As a further illustration, I may be permitted to give an instance from my own personal experience. After an illness with which a transient but high fever was associated, although otherwise fully recovered, I had lost all desire for food. There was something curious in this complete indifference towards eating. Perfectly well, I only differed from others in that I could with ease abstain from all food. Fearing that I should collapse, I resolved on the second or third day to endeavour to create an appetite by swallowing a mouthful of wine. I felt it quite distinctly pass along the œsophagus into the stomach, and literally at that moment perceived the onset of a strong appetite. This observation teaches that the tactile sensation of the stomach at the moment of entry of food is capable of awakening or increasing the appetite. It is known that withholding food from the organism, or in other words the creation of a necessity for food, does not lead immediately, nor in all cases, to the production of an appetite, to a passionate craving for food. How often does it happen that the ordinary hour for a meal has struck, and yet, owing to some keenly interesting occupation, not the least desire for food is felt? It is known to everybody, indeed it has become a proverb, that real appetite first sets in with eating. If this be true, the initial impulse towards awakening an appetite may originate in the stomach and not in the buccal cavity. When we spoke above of the desire for food being the excitant of the secretory nerves of the stomach, we naturally meant the passionate and conscious longing for food, that which is called “appetite,” and not the latent need of the organism for nourishment, the lack of nutrition, which has not yet been transformed into a concrete passionate desire. A good example which enables us to differentiate between these two factors is furnished by our dogs with sham feeding. The necessity for food exists in such cases even before the experiment; the juice, however, only begins to flow as soon as this need has taken the form of a passionate longing. It is therefore quite possible that in the case of some dogs, and at a certain stage of hunger, the touching of the gastric mucous membrane with any object at hand, its mechanical excitation, its distension by the food mass, may give the impulse which excites the appetite, and when the appetite is awakened the juice flows. This is possibly a third reason why, in the old experiment, the mechanical stimulus came to be considered effective. Viewed from this point it may, to a certain degree, lead to a reconciliation between my assertion concerning the inefficiency of the mechanical stimulus and the generally prevailing belief. I further also admit that mechanical excitation will at times call into play the work of the gastric glands, not however directly by means of a simple physiological