The year 1860 was memorable, for it was in this year that M. Rouvier published his scheme of "multiple transmission." In 1860, too, Broca, the pioneer of the physiology of the brain, proved that certain speech defects are associated with disease of a small part of the brain in the third left frontal convolution, and showed how different areas have special functions and receive a particular kind of message. He was, no doubt, very far from dreaming how complicated and diverse as a receiving medium the human brain is, but he was able to localize the function of speech, and thus to lay the foundation of all that made it possible for us to learn something about the hitherto unknown world of the cerebral cortex.
What connexion had this event with the other? That is to say, with the rapid development of a telegraphic system over the world? It appears to have had a certain connexion. For many years Broca worked, and before him men like him, Dubois Raymond, and other physiologists, were studying the nerve fibre, the electric action of nerves and muscle, and the transmission of nerve excitement. They found that there are hundreds of miles of nerve fibre in the human body, and that this fibre in living beings is just as much a roadway for traffic as is any line or cable ever laid. "Suppose," says an admirer
