The Ganglionic Nervous System; Its Structure, Functions, and Diseases

Abstract

once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows stronger and stronger by everything you see, hear, read, or understand." We fear that the hypothesis set forth in the work which we are about to notice is but another illustration of this profound dictum. Dr. Davey is of opinion that the ganglionic nervous system, or, in other words, the sympathetic nervous system, is the head and front of all the functions of organic life. " If," he writes, "the organic f unctions,as they obtain in the 'animal,' are to be referred to the ganglionic nervous system; or, what is the same thing, to the irritability of which it is the immediate seat, it follows, admitting the existence or operation of the same ' organic functions' in the vegetable kingdom, that plants are necessarily endowed with nerve-structure, and that this constitutes the analogue of the ganglionic nervous system in man and the higher animals."?(p. 4.) This sweeping corollary fittingly paves the way for the observations which Dr. Davey conceives warrant the conclusion, that the organic functions, as witnessed in the animal economy, are to be referred to