Recent discoveries in the finer structure of the central nervous system have provided many problems which at present appear insoluble. One of the discoveries most difficult to make use of in constructing theory is the existence of extracellular or pericellular nets, which have the appearance of extraordinarily delicate cases of wire-netting immediately surrounding the nerve-cells. It is somewhat remarkable that the spacing of the nets is often very similar to, if not identical with, the spacing of thorns. While some anatomists look upon the nets as nervous, others regard them as pertaining to the connective tissue of the nervous system. At present it is not known how impulses get across from the finest visible twigs of arborizing axons to the dendrites of the neurones which they influence. The wealth of structural detail which recent research has revealed is an embarrassment to anyone who tries to devise a scheme. Not improbably, pericellular nets are intermediate factors in the exchange; or, if not the nets, the structures whose existence is indicated by the appearance of the nets. In the case of many of the finer markings which staining methods bring into view, it is impossible to say whether they indicate the presence during life of the structure as it appears to be, or whether the markings are due to coagulation of plasma or to strain caused by shrinkage in coagulating agents. In a sense this is not of much consequence. Coagulation in a uniform pattern would mean the existence of an architectural substructure which determines the pattern. We may be looking at the cake or at the tin the cake was baked in.
There is a danger of seeing too much in a nerve-cell when examining it under the highest powers of the microscope, and of endeavouring to picture in too much detail the arrangements which regulate the flow of impulses. Its markings are so complicated as to suggest to the mind of the observer that it is itself a microcosm—a nervous system in miniature. Neuro-fibrillæ appear to offer many alternative paths within the cell. It is unlikely that such a way of looking at the unit of structure is the right one. A certain motor cell of the spinal cord is connected by its axon with thirty or forty separate muscle-fibres; but there is no reason for thinking that the fibres ever contract save as a single group. The axon consists of parallel fibrillæ, but these do not appear to be needed as separate conductors; an impulse travels down the fascicle. It does not appear to be necessary in the case of a motor cell, and presumably the statement holds good for the large cells of the cerebellum and cerebrum to picture any arrangement for the simultaneous conduction in its axon of several impulses, or for the conduction of one impulse along one of its fibrillæ and a different one along another. What is necessary is that this particular efferent path Z should be accessible from every other part of the nervous system—from A to Y. If, merely for the sake of filling the space which would otherwise be blank in the mental picture, we imagine a pericellular net connected by thorns with the body and dendrites of the nerve-cell Z, then the net is the meeting-ground of all the routes through which Z is called into action. A nerve-wave from any of the neurones A to Y, breaking upon this net, passes along the thorns into the protoplasm of Z.
