The nerves : their influence and importance in health and disease a contribution to popular physiology / by Sir George Lefevre.

  • George William Lefevre
Date:
[1844]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nerves : their influence and importance in health and disease a contribution to popular physiology / by Sir George Lefevre. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    nor press any wine without labourers at his disposal; hut as, under his command, one prepares the ground, another plants the vine, while a third prunes and a fourth waters, and all is perfected in due season, so we should find the nerves to hold a broken sceptre, but for the agents which are in readiness to conduct the operations which they control. These are sup- plied by the muscles. What variety do they as- sume in their forms and disposal, not less so in their functions. The brawny deltoid of an athlete, the smallest fibre, stretching and relaxing the tympanum, are of one and the same structure. The sloth mounts his ladder step by step, as he lays hold of the branches with his claws,—the sky-lark soars to the clouds by one and the same means. There is a directing power; but this woidd avail nought if the instrument of obe- dience were not perfect in its kind. There are the bones and ligaments, which seem to have been rather too much neglected by the exclusives. The little round shot of the fowler’s gun brings down the tenant of the air a humble suppliant to the ground; the muscle no longer obeys the nerve, because it can no longer rely upon the integrity of the bone. How the web is woven,—break but a few of its meshes, and the captive fly defies the spider still. The scratch of the lancet, which shall distort the eye and render expression hideous, shall also make that seemly which was before a blemish in the fea- tures. The twig of a twig is only implicated in this performance, but it is muscle or its terminating ex- tremity which is the subject of experiment. “ The nerves of expression” is a term someAvhat in the
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