Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/123

Rh processes, the nerve fibers, reach out to the most distant parts of the animal. These processes are the most characteristic parts of the neurone. Extending as they do in the largest animals for some meters from their cell bodies, they afford an example of a cell process such as is seen in no other histological unit. Not only are the nerve cells or neurones thus highly specialized in their structure, but they also exhibit profound physiological differentiation. Thus among the primary sensory neurones each one is connected, as a rule, with a particular portion of the animal for which no other neurone is responsible, and among the motor neurones each one controls a group of muscle fibers not called into action by any other neurone. Hence functional specialization among these elements has come to be so extreme that the nervous system may be described as one in which differentiation has reached to its very cells, a condition that is shown in no other elements of the body except possibly in the reproductive cells.

Notwithstanding the high degree of differentiation exhibited by the neurones of the higher animals, these elements may be easily grouped into relatively few classes distinguishable through their connections. These classes are three in number: first, the afferent, or as they are commonly called, the sensory neurones extending in general from the surface of the animal to the central organs and transmitting sensory impulses; secondly, the efferent neurones connecting the central organs with the muscles, glands, etc., and transmitting efferent impulses; and finally, what may be called the association neurones, to extend to the whole nervous system, a term used by Flechsig for elements in a limited part of the brain, or those neurones which lie entirely within the central organ and connect one part of this organ with another. Although the nervous organs of the higher animals are composed of an abundance of all three classes of neurones, the association neurones in all probability far outnumber those of the other two classes and constitute the chief mass of these organs.

Almost all nervous operations in the higher animals involve all three classes of neurones. The typical nervous reaction of these animals consists of a sensory stimulation followed by a motor response. This operation has been called a reflex, to use that term in its widest sense, that is, irrespective of the association of the action with voluntary or conscious operations. Such a reflex takes place over an arc of neurones, the sensory members transmitting to the association elements, and these in turn to the motor elements, but in describing the reflex its parts are not conveniently dealt with from the standpoint of the neurone. The reflex, as ordinarily understood, begins with the activity of a sense organ or receptor, from which a sensory impulse passes to the central nervous system or adjustor, whence the nervous disturbance makes its way to the third element or effector, usually a muscle. The sense