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"It should be especially observed that Brown-Sequard had bred during thirty years many thousand guinea-pigs from animals which had not been operated upon, and not one of these manifested the epileptic tendency. Nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born without toes, which was not the offspring of parents which had gnawed off their own toes owing to the sciatic nerve having been divided.
It was not until 1869 that Brown-Séquard first suggested that an important secretion was elaborated by the ductless glands and received into the circulation, but that suggestion proved to be epoch-making.
Weismann at once objected that the operations of Brown-Séquard might have introduced certain special microbes into the body of the guinea-pig, which had found their means of nutrition in the nervous tissues and transmitted the malady by penetrating into the sexual elements. This objection has been answered by Brown-Séquard himself; but a more plausible one might be raised.
Diminution of the temperature of muscles before death increases their irritability. But diminution of their temperature also retards cadaveric rigidity and putrefaction. Both these truths were first made known by Dr. Brown-Séquard himself, through experiments which conclude according to the Method of Difference. There is nothing in the nature of the process requiring specific analysis. 3d.
Brown-Séquard announced his theory of the dual brain. A writer in an English magazine called attention to the fact that the discovery had been anticipated by an imaginative writer, and cited the passage in the text as proving that the author of "The Hoosier School-Master" had outrun Dr. Brown-Séquard in perceiving the duality of the brain.
Let us look at what there is of it. Considerable weight attaches to a fact which Brown-Séquard discovered, quite by accident, in the course of his researches.
The experiments of Brown-Sequard have shown the problem to be a complex one, and raised almost as many doubts as they have solved questions; at any rate, I believe all lecturers on physiology agree that there is no part of their task they dread so much as the analysis of the evidence relating to the special offices of the different portions of the medulla spinalis.
So the spinal canal, the existence of which, at least in the adult, has been so often disputed, appears as a coarse and unequivocal anatomical fact in many of the preparations referred to. While these studies of the structure of the cord have been going on, the ingenious and indefatigable Brown-Sequard has been investigating the functions of its different parts with equal diligence.
The truth is, when every doubtful case, every fact open to more than one interpretation, has been eliminated, there remains hardly a single unquestionable example of acquired and transmitted peculiarities, beyond the famous experiments of Brown-Séquard, repeated and confirmed by other physiologists.
Brown-Sequard, in his address before the Medical Faculty of Paris in 1869, was the first to suggest that glands, with or without ducts, supplied special substances to the blood which were useful or necessary to the normal health, and in 1889 at a meeting of the Societe de Biologie he described the experiment he had made upon himself by the injection of testicular extract.
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