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 of Dubois Raymond, "that the nerves of hearing and of sight of a man were cut, and the outer end of the former was perfectly joined to the central end of the latter, then the sound of an orchestra would awaken in us the sensation of light and colour, and if the fibre serving the centre of vision was affixed to the hearing part of the brain, then a highly coloured picture would give us impressions of sound!" Thus far, in function as well as form, the parallelism between fibre and wire is as close as it well could be.

However, physiologists and artisans worked apart as usual. For years the latter made efforts to lay a cable between America and England. Once and again they set forth to make the attempt. Every one knows how they failed again and again, and how fruitful these failures were; how they indicated to Sir William Thomson a means of helping the baffled workers by improving the receiving centre by his new sensitive galvanometer. They made the fibre—he made the brain cells. And then at last, in 1860, across the wild ocean lifting its steep, blue, moving hills for thousands of leagues the fibre was laid that joined two continents.

Over the leaf is a drawing (from Ernest Kapp's book) of transverse cuttings of cable, and of nerve fibre. On