Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/432

416 the same side, and applies the foot to rubbing off the acetic acid; and what is still more remarkable, if you hold down the limb, so that the frog cannot use it, he will, by-and-by, take the limb of the other side and turn it across the body, and use it for the same rubbing process."

This goes a step further, requiring a more complicated mechanism to direct the force, when it fails to move one foot, to the movement of the other. In still another case, he says: "Suppose the foremost two-thirds of the brain taken away, the frog is then absolutely devoid of any spontaneity; it will remain forever where you leave it; it will not stir, unless it is touched; . . . but, . . . if you throw it in the water, it begins to swim—swims just as well as the perfect frog does; . . . and the only way we can account for this is, that the impression made on the sensory nerves of the skin of the frog by the contact of the water conveys to the central nervous apparatus a stimulus which sets going a certain machinery by which all the muscles of swimming are brought into play in due order of succession. Moreover, if the frog be stimulated, be touched by some irritating body, although we are quite certain it cannot feel, it jumps or walks as well as the complete frog can do."

Most persons, I presume, have seen men and other animals made so torpid by injury or disease, that they would show little sign of vitality, and great indisposition to make any effort, but that they still moved when pricked with a pin has been generally regarded as evidence that they still felt; and the movements they would make to avoid danger, or escape pain, have been thought to be conclusive that they were not "absolutely devoid of any spontaneity."

It is not uncommon for a man, who, in ordinary circumstances seemed wholly unable to move his limbs, under great or sudden excitement, as the approach of fire or sudden apprehension of drowning, to make vigorous and successful muscular efforts.

The common observer, then, would infer from the foregoing experiments that Prof. Huxley was not justified in inferring, from the fact of mutilation, that the frog was "absolutely devoid of any spontaneity," and that "we are quite certain it cannot feel." If the facts stated do not prove that the frog still feels, still wills, and still has knowledge to direct its efforts to get rid of the irritation, it seems difficult to devise any mode of proof that a being ever feels, knows, or wills. Prof. Huxley admits that we do feel and know, but infers from these experiments that we do not will. If his theory of them is correct, they seem to afford little ground for this distinction.

Prof. Huxley, in still another case, says of a frog deprived of the most anterior portion of the brain, that "it will sit forever in the same spot. It sees nothing, it hears nothing," yet placed on the hand would, on the turning of the hand, make all the movements necessary to prevent its falling off, and that "these movements are performed with the utmost steadiness and precision, and you may vary the