| Description | Stark shares the results of his microscopic and chemical examinations into the structure and composition of the nerves. He concludes that they consist, in their whole extent, of a disorderly collection of membranous tubes, cylindrical in their form, placed parallel to one another, and united into fasciculi of various sizes; but that neither these fasciculi nor the individual tubes are enveloped by any filamentous tissue. He observes that these tubular membranes are composed of extremely minute filaments, placed in a strictly longitudinal direction, in exact parallelism with each other, and consisting of granules of the same kind as those which form the basis of all the solid structures of the body; and that the matter which fills the tubes is of an oily nature, differing in no essential respect from butter, or soft fat, and remaining of a fluid consistence during the life of the animal, or while it retains its natural temperature, but becoming granular or solid when the animal dies, or its temperature is much reduced. As oily substances are well known to be non-conductors of electricity, and as the nerves have been shown by the experiments of Bischoff to be among the worst possible conductors of this agent, Stark contends that the nervous agency can be neither electricity, nor galvanism, nor any property related to those powers. He conceives that the phenomena are best explained on the hypothesis of undulations or vibrations propagated along the course of the tubes which compose the nerves, by the medium of the oily globules they contain. He traces the operation of the various causes which produce sensation, in giving rise to these undulations; and extends the same explanation to the phenomena of voluntary motion, as consisting in undulations, commencing in the brain, as determined by the will, and propagated to the muscles. He corroborates his views by ascribing the effects of cold in diminishing or destroying both sensibility and the power of voluntary motion, particularly as exemplified in the hybernation of animals, to its mechanical operation of diminishing the fluidity, or producing solidity, in the oily medium by which these powers are exercised.
Annotations in pencil throughout.
Subject: Medicine / Neuroscience
Received 10 November 1842. Communicated by J F W [James Finlay Weir] Johnston.
Whilst the Royal Society declined to publish this paper in full, an abstract of the paper was published in volume 4 of Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [later Proceedings of the Royal Society] as 'On the nerves'. |