Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/148

 CHAPTER VIII

THE PROJECTION OF NERVES

ERE we may halt—in a book about children. But a glance forward and beyond them may be allowed. What we may call the projection of nerves has taken place very rapidly—all within the last century and a half.

As always happens, the artisan inventor was ahead of the physiologist and discoverer. (Sometimes, of course, the inventor becomes the discoverer.) In 1774, Le Sage laid insulated metal wires under the Rhine and connected these with pith-ball electroscopes. There were twenty-four wires, one for each letter of the alphabet, and the message was transmitted by frictional electricity. This was sixty years or more before Dubois Raymond begun his studies on nerve fibre—that is, on nervous conductors of the body. But even in the early telegraphs the wire reproduced the fibre more or less in detail, having gaps in the supports, as in the fibre, and reproducing too the outer sheath. And every year saw a host of seekers 122