Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/430

416 similar view, and the general conclusion now is, that during sleep the brain is really supplied with less blood than in waking hours.

To account for the reason why the brain is less freely fed with blood in sleep, it has been surmised that the vessels, the arteries, which feed the brain, and which for contractile purposes are supplied with nerves from the organic nervous system, are, under their nervous influence, made to close so that a portion at least of the blood which enters through them is cut off on going to sleep. This view, however, presupposes that the organic nervous centres, instead of sharing in the exhaustion incident to labor, put forth increased power after fatigue, an idea incompatible with all we know of the natural functions.

Carmichael, an excellent physiologist, thought that sleep was brought on by a change in the assimilation of the brain, and by what he called the deposition of new matter in the organ, but he offered no evidence in proof: while Metcalfe, one of the most learned physicists and physicians of our time, maintained that the proximate cause of sleep is an expenditure of the substance and vital energy of the brain, nerves, and voluntary muscles, beyond what they receive when awake, and that the specific office of sleep is the restoration of what has been wasted by exercise: the most remarkable difference between exercise and sleep being, that during exercise the expenditure exceeds the income; whereas during sleep the income exceeds the expenditure. This idea of Metcalfe's expresses, probably, a broad truth, but it is too general to indicate the proximate cause of sleep, to explain which is the object of his proposition.

My own researches on the proximate cause of sleep—researches which of late years have been steadily pursued—lead me to the conclusion that none of the theories as yet offered account correctly for the natural phenomenon of sleep; although I must express that some of them are based on well-defined facts. It is perfectly true that exhaustion of the brain will induce phenomena so closely allied to the phenomena of natural sleep, that no one could tell the artificially-induced from the natural sleep; and it is equally true that pressure upon the brain will also lead to a state of sleep simulating the natural. For example, in a young animal, a pigeon, I can induce the deepest sleep by exposing the brain to the influence of extreme cold. I have had a bird sleeping calmly for ten hours under the local influence of cold. During this time the state of the brain is one of extreme blood lessness [sic], and, when the cold is cautiously withdrawn and the brain is allowed to refill gently with blood, the sleep passes away. This is clear enough, and the cold, it may be urged, produces contraction of the brain-substance and of the vessels, with diminution of blood, and with sleep as the result. But if, when the animal is awaking from this sleep induced by cold, I apply warmth, for the unsealing of the parts, a little too freely, if, that is to say, I restore the natural warmth too quickly, then the animal falls asleep again under an opposite condition; for now into