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The brain, by which we mean the biggest one near the mouth, we have little brains, or ganglia all over our bodies, so far from being an absolute monarch, is not even a constitutional one, or a president of a republic, but a mere house of congress of the modern type, which can do little but register and obey the demands of its constituents. The brain originates nothing.
Professor Draper, another eminent authority, says: "I find that the cerebrum is absolutely analogous to in construction to any other nervous arc. It is composed of centripetal and centrifugal fibres, having also registering ganglia.
Does not the horse see, hear and think? There is no lowering of the dignity of man to say that he tastes with his palate, sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and thinks with the gray matter in his brain. Remove his optic nerve and he becomes blind, destroy the ganglia in his brain, and he becomes mindless.
And when, as commonly happens, the king begins to collect round himself advisers who aid him by communicating information, preparing subjects for his judgment, and issuing his orders; we may say that the form of organization is comparable to one very general among inferior types of animals, in which there exists a chief ganglion with a few dispersed minor ganglia under its control.
*Spinal Nerves and Dorsal-root Ganglia.*—The spinal nerves comprise a group of thirty-one pairs, which connect the spinal cord with different parts of the trunk, with the upper, and with the lower extremities. Each nerve joins the cord by two roots, these being named from their positions the ventral, or anterior, root and the dorsal, or posterior, root.
In entering the mouth the sting did not reach the cervical ganglia, or sudden death would have ensued and we should have before our eyes corpses which would go bad in a few days, instead of fresh carcases in which traces of life remain manifest for a long time. The cephalic nerve-centres have been spared. What is wounded then, to procure this profound inertia of the poison-fangs?
Those of the legs do not in any way comply with the conditions imposed: the result of stinging them would be merely a partial disorder which far from subduing the insect, would render it more dangerous by irritating it yet further. A sting in the joint of the neck is not admissible: it would injure the cervical ganglia and lead to death, followed by putrefaction.
The fulfilment of all legislative decisions still devolves on the original directive centres: the impulse passing from the Parliament to the Ministers and from the Ministers to the King, in whose name everything is done; just as those smaller, first-developed ganglia, which in the lowest vertebrata are the chief controlling agents, are still, in the brains of the higher vertebrata, the agents through which the dictates of the cerebrum are worked out.
The single dagger-thrust is administered to ganglia collected into a common cluster; the manifold thrusts are distributed over the scattered ganglia; of the two thrusts of the Tarantula-huntress, one disarms and the other paralyses. And so with the others: that is to say, the instinct is directed each time by the secrets of the nervous organism.
These masses are called especially the sympathetic ganglia.
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