The Life and Letters of George John Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.Romanes, George John
Science
The Life and Letters of George John Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.
Romanes, George John
Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Romanes, George John, 1848-1894
The results of these experiments led him to infer the existence of a
very fine plexus of nerve fibres, in which the constituent threads
cross and re-cross one another without actually coalescing. This
conclusion, which he arrived at from purely experimental grounds, was
some years afterwards confirmed by minute histological research.
Finally, the effect of various poisons, chloroform, alcohol, &c., was
tried, and the striking resemblance of their action on the nervous
system of the Medusæ with that which they exert on that of higher
animals supports the belief that nerve tissue when it first appears
in the scene of life has the same fundamental properties as it has in
higher animals.
This piece of work was important, as the facts threw light, as
Professor Sanderson has said, on elementary questions of physiology
relating to excitability and conduction, and it was a characteristic
of Mr. Romanes that in all his work, of whatever kind, he was always
searching for principles. The minutest detail never escaped his
attention if it appeared at all likely in any way to throw light on
some biological or psychological problem. Only a trained scientific
worker can appreciate the amount of labour these Royal Society papers
represented. In 1875 he gave a Friday evening lecture at the Royal
Institution on his work on Medusæ.
He was also at this time working on the subject of 'Pangenesis,'[7]
and a series of letters to Mr. Darwin and to Professor Schäfer may
interest some readers.
18 Cornwall Terrace, Regent's Park, N.W.:
January 14, 1875.
Dear Mr. Darwin,--I should very much like to see the papers
to which you allude. _A priori_ one would have thought the
bisecting plan the more hopeful, but if the other has yielded
positive results, in the case of an eye and tubers, I think it
would be worth while to try the effect of transplanting various
kinds of pips into the pulps of kindred varieties of fruit;
for the homological relations in this case would be pretty much
the same as in the other, with the exception of the bud being
an impregnated one. If positive results ensued, however, this
last-mentioned fact would be all the better for 'Pangenesis.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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