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PART II.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS.

ART. I.-The Anatomy of Sleep, or the Art of procuring sound and refreshing Slumber at will. By EDWARD BINNS, M. D., &c. &c. Second Edition, with Annotations and Additions by the Right Honourable the Earl STANHOPE. 12mo. London, 1845. Pp. 505.

THE Anatomy of Sleep is a notable example of how much can be made out of nothing by a little ingenuity. The aim of the work is to communicate the mode or art of procuring sound and refreshing sleep at will; and this, which is told at the end of the volume, does not take up more than one page and two lines. The remaining 503 pages, or, more properly speaking, the whole volume, with the exception of this page and few lines, is taken up with an olla podrida collection of facts and observations on life and its phenomena, death, sleep, drowsiness, trance, premature interments, hybernation, capability of animal body enduring extremes of heat and cold, dreams, somnambulism, catalepsy, hallucination, monomania, fainting, asphyxia, syncope, suffocation, drowning, hanging, mesmerism, systems of organization, mental phenomena, sleeplessness, arterialization, narcotism, &c., in fact every thing which could be made to seem in any, even the most distant way, connected with the phenomena of sleep. No, we are wrong in saying every thing; for, in none of his illustrations of the nature of sleep, does Dr Binns take notice of the connection between the stertor during sleep and the stertor during comatose states; nowhere does he show the analogy between coma and sleep. Dr Binns's diligence in collecting facts and observations on the above-mentioned subjects has been great, and the consequence has been a most amusing work, better fitted, however, to advance the author's popularity as an amusing writer than his reputation as a man of science. Dr Binns, in fact, can have no pretensions to the character of a philosophic writer, for he has neither advanced our knowledge of what sleep is, nor has he even

attempted to prove by reasoning, by observation, or by experiment, that his crude views of the nature of sleep are correct. We shall therefore first notice the author's statements on this point, and then turn to the more amusing parts of his work.

"If life be a succession of ideas, (says Dr Binns,) SLEEP is the remission; consequently, SLEEP is the escape or absence of reflection. In brutes, it is the cessation of the functions of the voluntary muscles, through the repose of the senses.”—P. 1.

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One would naturally imagine, from this opening paragraph, that our author would draw the philosophic conclusion of Bichat, that sleep was a negative, and not a positive function. But no. Dr Binns, apparently for no other reason than that the animal still lives while asleep, and that its digestion, respiration, circulation, and nutrition are going on, concludes that "sleep, then, is not a negative, but a positive state of existence," or, as he elsewhere calls it, a positive function ;" and he seems not a little offended that physiologists should not have assigned separate organs to preside over sleep, as well as lungs for breathing, or a brain for thinking. Accordingly, Dr Binns assumes that such an organ must be present in the animal body, and asks, " But where is this organ situated? In the cerebrum, cerebellum, or medulla oblongata? We think in no one of these organs, but that we are to look for it in the medulla spinalis, or spinal cord, and that it will be found between the cervical and lumbar vertebræ, in the ganglia formed from the nerves given off by this portion of the spinal column."--P. 428.

We should have deemed it almost unnecessary to have attempted the refutation of such visionary and baseless theories could we have supposed the author ignorant of the functions of those ganglia to which he alludes; but standing in the position of a physician, who ought to be acquainted with what is going on in the medical world, we cannot give him credit for ignorance, especially seeing he could have corrected in this his second edition any mistakes into which he had fallen in the first.

The valuable researches of Brachet, whose work was published in 1830, corroborated as they have been by subsequent inquirers, proved that the ganglia preside over those functions and acts which, were they to cease for one moment, would cause the death of the animal. It is by the ganglionic influence that the heart, the vessels, the bowels, the glandular organs, &c. perform their ceaseless, never-tiring functions-functions which cease but with life. Now, one most remarkable peculiarity of the organs which these ganglia supply with nerves is that they never sleep; they are equally awake whether the person be sleeping or waking. For this, however, we may find a reason. Most of the organs supplied with nerves from ganglia undergo constant alternations of excitement VOL. LXIV. NO. 164.

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and repose. This is very marked with regard to the lungs, heart, bowels, and arteries; and it might be worth while to inquire whether all the glandular organs are not in a similar state; i. e. whether during the passage of the pulse of arterial blood they are in the state of excitement, and in a state of repose during the interval between the pulsations. However the case be with the glands, the fact is certain with regard to the first-mentioned organs. Now these organs never sleep; consequently the ganglia which supply these organs with nerves, and keep them constantly awake, could never act in a directly opposite manner on the other organs of the body over which they exert no direct influence. The brain and spinal chord, or the larger ganglionic knots in the lower animals, supply distinct organs-organs which are under the dominion of the will organs which are stimulated to action by the will-organs which after a certain amount of exertion require a certain period of repose. Now it is these voluntarily excited and exciting organs which require repose in sleep-sleep is their repose. Sleep is to them that state which the relaxation is to the contraction of the heart and muscles of the bowels; sleep is to them a state analogous to that repose which the respiratory muscles experience during expiration. Sleep is therefore, as Bichat and other physiologists have wisely styled it, a negative state—negative, as opposed to the active state of the voluntary organs during the waking period-negative, because it is the state of repose of organs which are active during wakefulness-negative, because it is the cessation of the functions of these organs.

Seeing that such is the case, whatever will produce or induce quiescence of volition, mental and corporeal, will allow this state to steal over the animal body. How, it may be inquired, have men in all ages endeavoured to coax sleep, but by endeavouring by some means or other to bring on the very mental and corporeal quiescence -by endeavouring to produce a monotony which quells the activity of the mind-by directing the restless mind to one and one only train till it falls asleep under the fatigue of monotony? Hence the known languor induced by listening to the murmur of waters, to the sighing of the breeze through the trees, to monotonous sounds, as reading, or to repeating over some well-known verses or prayers, or by keeping the eyes fixed on one spot-all are alone referrible to arresting the further progress of thought by fixing it on one point, which by its monotony allays its restlessness, and allows tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep, to steep the senses in forgetfulness.

That this has been recognised and acted on from the earliest. ages is not only apparent from the fact that all the means proposed to induce sleep naturally have this effect, viz. producing a monotony of thought, so that by the continual recurrence of the

same idea thought itself becomes extinguished; but has even attracted the attention of the poets, a few of whose most beautiful passages take notice of the fact. Indeed so prevalent is the idea that monotony will induce sleep, that our celebrated Irish bard Moore attributes the very same effect to montonous beauty.

"Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender

Till love falls asleep in its sameness of splendour."

Now what does Dr Binns do more than this with all his new and unsupported theory? Why positively he arrives at the very same conclusion. His celebrated recipe for the procuring sound and refreshing slumber at will, not by the bye his own after all, but the late eccentric Mr Gardner's, is as follows.

"Having taken a full inspiration, the lungs are then to be left to their own action,—that is, the respiration is neither to be accelerated nor retarded too much, but a very full inspiration must be taken. The attention must now be fixed upon the action in which the patient is engaged. He must depict to himself that he sees the breath passing from his nostrils in a continuous stream; and the very instant that he brings his mind to conceive this apart from all other ideas, consciousness and memory depart, imagination slumbers, fancy becomes dormant, thought ceases, the sentient faculties lose their susceptibility, the vital or ganglionic system assumes the sovereignty, and, as we before remarked, he no longer wakes, but sleeps; for the instant the mind is brought to the contemplation of a single sensation, that instant the sensorium abdicates the throne, and the hypnotic faculty steeps it in oblivion."-P. 436.

This is the grand recipe, to communicate which to the world this volume was written. And what is it, after all, more than all were previously aware of? It is simply another way of producing monotony; it is simply the abstraction of the mind from other thoughts to one, which, by its monotony, lulls its restlessness to rest, and allows the negative function, sleep, to steal over the

senses.

That sleep can be induced by narcotics, that it is favoured by the removal of all stimuli, that it is induced by many affections and injuries of the brain, which destroy mental and corporeal volition, still further tends to prove that sleep is a negative function. We are, therefore, not necessitated to look out for an organ to preside over sleep; and if an organ did preside over that function, it would not be one like a ganglion, distributed only to the viscera and blood-vessels, but must necessarily be one whose ramifications pervaded the whole economy, stretching to the most distant organs of the body, and especially to the voluntary organs.

If, however, we attempted to determine in what particular organ or set of organs this negative function was seated, we would not for a moment hesitate to say in the brain and spinal chord, or,

in the lower animals, in the larger nervous centres. The experiments and observations of Bichat, Blumenbach, Wilson Philip, Flourens, Longet, &c. notwithstanding that their theories differ somewhat from each other, most unquestionably prove that the proximate cause of sleep is an increased proportion of venous blood in the brain, and a diminished flow of arterial blood. Dr Lyon Playfair, merely pursuing Blumenbach's views, perhaps without being aware of them, and showing their accordance with Liebig's theory, refines on the above simple facts, and attributes sleep to the arrestment of that oxygenation or waste of the brain, which he assumes, without any proof, goes on during the exercise of thought, or during watchfulness; and Dr Wilson Philip, also taking a chemical view of the question, attributes it to the accu mulation of carbon in the blood. Whichever explanation we adopt, the fact remains undoubted of the diminished flow of arterial blood, and the increased amount of venous blood in the brain or nervous centres during sleep. This explains philosophically all the phenomena, and, if taken in connection with the chemical explanation of its modus operandi, forms a beautiful and consistent theory. Of Dr Binns's theory, and his supposed organ in which the sense of sleep is situated, the less said the better.

A fact has been long known to us strongly corroborative of the above philosophic view of the cause of sleep; and we are chiefly induced to allude to it, and point out its true cause, because some mesmeric believers have been lately gulling the public by making them believe it was the production of a mesmeric state in the lower animals. A bird is taken into the hand, and after being held there for a little while, with its head bent down, is laid on the ground, and a chalk line is drawn in a line with its bill. It lies there for about five minutes perfectly motionless, when it gradually awakes as from a sleep. This has been styled the production of mesmeric sleep in birds. Almost every clodpole knows how to do this with domestic poultry, as we have often seen; but he gives a very different explanation of the phenomena. The bird is seized, its head bent under its wing; it is then given a swing round the head, and laid on the ground. A state of stupor or sleep is produced, and so perfect is it for a short while, that we have seen nearly a dozen fowls lying side by side in this comatose state. The country people attribute the state to the bird being rendered giddy by the swing which is given to it; but the same state is produced by holding the bird's head under the wing without giving it any swing. This state of stupor is evidently produced by the very same process which the bird itself follows when it wishes to retire to rest. It bends its head under its wing, produces thus a diminished flow of arterial blood, and a somewhat congested state of the venous circulation, which, by in