contrary, conceive of the 'motor zone' as essentially sensory, and in different ways explain the motor disorders as secondary results of the anæsthesia which is always there. Munk calls the motor zone the Fühlsphäre of the animal's limbs, etc., and makes it coördinate with the Sehsphäre, the Hörsphäre, etc., the entire cortex being, according to him, nothing but a projection-surface for sensations, with no exclusively or essentially motor part. Such a view would be important if true, through its bearings on the psychology of volition. What is the truth? As regards the fact of cutaneous anaesthesia from motor-zone ablations, all other observers are against Ferrier, so that he is probably wrong in denying it. On the other hand, Munk and Schiff are wrong in making the motor symptoms depend on the anæsthesia, for in certain rare cases they have been observed to exist not only without insensibility, but with actual hyperæsthesia of the parts.[1] The motor and sensory symptoms seem, therefore, to be independent variables.
In monkeys the latest experiments are those of Horsley and Schaefer,[2] whose results Ferrier accepts. They find that excision of the hippocampal convolution produces transient insensibility of the opposite side of the body, and that permanent insensibility is produced by destruction of its continuation upwards above the corpus callosum, the so-called gyrus fornicatus (the part just below the 'calloso-marginal fissure' in Fig. 7). The insensibility is at its maximum when the entire tract comprising both convolutions is destroyed. Ferrier says that the sensibility of monkeys is 'entirely unaffected' by ablations of the motor zone,[3] and Horsley and Schaefer consider it by no means necessarily
- ↑ Bechterew (Pflüger's Archiv., vol. 35, p. 137) found no anæsthesia in a cat with motor symptoms from ablation of sigmoid gyrus. Luciani got hyperæsthesia coexistent with cortical motor defect in a dog, by simultaneously hemisecting the spinal cord (Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. p. 234). Goltz frequently found hyperæsthesia of the whole body to accompany motor defect after ablation of both frontal lobes, and he once found it after ablating the motor zone (Pflüger's Archiv, vol. 34, p. 471).
- ↑ Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 20 ff.
- ↑ Functions, p. 375.
