As a text-book the work appears to me a great deal too large; and the treatment of the subjects too diffuse; and often not clear; this is especially so in the anatomical part. Cerebral anatomy is one of those subjects of which it is very difficult to treat in a clear and comprehensive manner so that others can understand it; and for this reason a text-book should be small and contain only such anatomy as is clearly made out and can be made practical use of as applied anatomy. The finer anatomy and the study of the course of fibres, etc., should be taken up as a special work, and studied with patience on specimens, sections, etc.
A great many digressions into physiological questions might have been left out, and some other subjects properly belonging to general medicine, which the student could best study in some of the recent works on diseases of the nervous system, or at the clinics. As an illustration of what is meant, take, for instance, a consideration of the tendon reflex on page 576, and the short imperfect sketch on page 621, on progressive muscular atrophy, when on the next page is a figure of a man, forty-five years old, with progressive muscular atrophy, from Freidreich’s work; a case which, by the way, is probably not a case of chronic myelitis of the anterior horns, but one of the cystrophies. The subject of progressive muscular atrophies is now undergoing close study, and a large number of cases are not dependent upon lesions of the anterior horns, but are due to changes in the muscles themselves. The work of Freidreich, Erb, Lichtheim, Ladaur, Charcot, Landonzy and Dejeuni, and many others, have placed the subject in a different light from that in which it was viewed some ten years ago.
Subjects like these can be found more satisfactorily treated in other works, and are altogether out of place in a book like this and only adds to its bulk.
The descriptions are often such as to confuse and mislead a student; for instance, take the opening chapter on the brain, where the author says: “In man and the vertebrates, the cerebro and spinal axis may be divided into three separate portions, each perfectly independent of one another and yet very intimately connected.”