Pathology of the Brain and the Nervous System

supplied in smaller abundance through slender nerves, they persist for a longer time in the same station, just like veteran soldiers, and often expend a manifold coupling. Otherwise, from where is a store of spirits sufficient for such great labor derived for beasts of burden, while for several hours, indeed sometimes for a whole day, they exercise almost all their muscles in a swifter pace? Or who would believe that a few handfuls of spirits, brought to the heart through the slender branches of the vagus and intercostal nerve-pairs, could by their own power effect its so robust and non-discontinuous motion? To them, indeed, it seems necessary that subsidiary forces approach perpetually from the blood, and that these same be always immediately exploded. Certainly for this reason the motive power of both the heart and of other muscles becomes more robust and, beyond any mechanical organ, elastic: namely, insofar as the animal spirits, acting everywhere in the muscular kind, take to themselves an explosive coupling.

But if the term Explosion, as yet unusual in Philosophy and medicine, should please anyone less; so that a spasmodic Pathology [Pathologia σπασμώδης] leaning upon this base should seem only an explanation of the unknown by the more unknown: it will be easy to bring forward very many instances and examples of effects of this kind, concerning things both natural and artificial; from whose analogy the most fitting reasons are derived for the motions performed in an animate body, both regularly and irregularly [ἀνωμάλως]. For besides the mixtures of Nitre with Sulphur, with Tartar, and with Antimony, all of which are ignited with a detonation; and fulminating Gold, and the composition from salt of Tartar, Nitre, and Sulphur, which without actual ignition, being only more thoroughly heated, are exploded with a vehement crash; many liquors might also be referred to here, which, when mixed together or poured upon certain bodies, enter into or stir up violent and plainly explosive motions: Spirit of nitre, and the liquor of glacial Antimony poured together; indeed