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Modern neurologists speak of the abdominal and pelvic brains, denoting thereby sympathetic nerve-centres in those parts which are strongly affected by any psychical action. This view of mental physiology once admitted, the syllogism of seppuku is easy to construct. "I will open the seat of my soul and show you how it fares with it. See for yourself whether it is polluted or clean."
The common phrase, "He is working himself up into a passion," indicates a perception of the fact that consciousness sometimes employs memories, thoughts, associations, etc. to arouse the lower nerve-centres that are connected with the emotion of anger. It is so also with various other emotions.
The points wounded are not stung because they are the only points penetrable by the lancet; they are stung because they fulfil an important condition, without which penetrability loses its value. This condition is none other than the immediate proximity of the nerve-centres whose influence has to be suppressed.
First of all, to safeguard the operator, a stab in the mouth, that point so terribly armed, the most formidable of all; then, to safeguard the larva, a second stab in the nerve-centres of the thorax, to suppress the power of movement.
I select from my heap of garden-mould, that inexhaustible mine, two larvae of the Rhinoceros Beetle, Oryctes nasicornis, about one-third full-grown, so that their size may not be out of proportion to the Scolia's. It is in fact almost identical with the size of the Cetonia. I paralyse one of them by giving an injection of ammonia in the nerve-centres.
Scientists say that the human system has two nerve-centres one in the brain, to which and from which are telegraphed all movements depending upon the will, and another in the small of the back, the centre of the involuntary operations of respiration, digestion, and so on. It may be fanciful to suppose that in the national system Washington is the one nervous centre and New York the other.
In our New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it, as the novels of Zola and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.
As a consequence of division of labour, there have here been developed various sense-organs as organs of specific sensibility, muscles as organs of motion and volition, nerve-centres or ganglia as central co-ordinating and regulating organs. In the most highly developed families of the animal kingdom, these last come more and more into the foreground as independent soul-organs.
The Scoliae, then, whose destiny it is to hunt and paralyse under the soil the victuals for their family, require a prey made highly vulnerable by the close assemblage of the nerve-centres, as are the Weevils and Buprestes of the Cerceres; and this is why it has fallen to their lot to share among them the larvae of the Scarabaeidae.
Speed spoke up brightly: "Well, let's go back to the house and wait for Covington." "But you were getting ready to go running," said Helen. "No more running for me! I'm in good enough shape, eh, Larry?" "Great! Barring the one thing." "What's that?" queried Fresno. "A little trouble with one of his nerve-centres, that's all.
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