Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/115

IX ] account. Retzius then gave Swedenborg full credit for his discoveries, one of which, later to be called the "foramen of Key and Retzius," Swedenborg had already deduced. Of course Retzius emphasized the great discovery, that of the seat of the psychical functions in the cortex, and the localization of the motor functions, as well as the fact that Swedenborg brought "sure proof to show that the motion of the brain not only exists and constantly presents itself in living conditions, but is also synchronous and closely connectcd with the motion of the lungs, the respiratory motion."

After praising other discoveries, Professor Retzius asked: "How was all this possible?" He answered, "Swedenborg was not only a learned anatomist and a sharp-sighted observer, but also in many respects an unprejudiced, acute and deep anatomical thinker."

In 1910, at a meeting of the anatomy section of the British Medical Association, the professor of anatomy at Upsala, Sweden, Martin Ramström, read a paper, published in the British Medical Journal,8 in which he underscored Swedenborg's brain discoveries. Not only had he shown the function of the brain cortex in governing muscular action, but he had relegated automatic and habitual movements to the gray substance of the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord as secondary motor centers.

Ramström emphasized, moreover, that Swedenborg in the Economy had decidedly opposed the current "pre-formation" theory of the embryo.

To bring the chorus up to date, when the full text of the hitherto unpublished parts of Swedenborg's Cerebrum was published in the United States in 1939, scientific reviewers of our own day also greatly wondered. While they deprecated the mistakes (mainly due to lack of knowledge of facts which Swedenborg couldn't have known), one of them 9 was sincerely puzzled as to how Swedenborg nevertheless had found out something "worthy of a Nobel prize" without the necessary modern microscope. It had to do with the nature of the coat with which the arteries enter the capillary ramifications. Swedenborg himself said that "this is a matter cannot be explored by the senses." "From various signs," however, he said, he found it possible to conclude something, correctly.10

Another modern medical reviewer of the Cerebrum says, "Here