American Indian Stories Long Soldier

Visit to download the full and correct content document:

https://textbookfull.com/product/american-indian-stories-long-soldier/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Chinese Soldier vs Japanese Soldier China 1937 38

Benjamin Lai

https://textbookfull.com/product/chinese-soldier-vs-japanese-
soldier-china-1937-38-benjamin-lai/

America’s Early Whalemen: Indian Shore Whalers on Long

Island, 1650–1750 John A Strong

https://textbookfull.com/product/americas-early-whalemen-indian-
shore-whalers-on-long-island-1650-1750-john-a-strong/

American Government: Stories of a Nation Scott F

Abernathy

https://textbookfull.com/product/american-government-stories-of-
a-nation-scott-f-abernathy/

American Indian Educators in Reservation Schools 1st

Edition Terry Huffman

https://textbookfull.com/product/american-indian-educators-in-
reservation-schools-1st-edition-terry-huffman/
The Best American Short Stories 2019 The Best American
Series 10th Edition Anthony Doerr

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-best-american-short-
stories-2019-the-best-american-series-10th-edition-anthony-doerr/

Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American

Long Poem Matthew Carbery

https://textbookfull.com/product/phenomenology-and-the-late-
twentieth-century-american-long-poem-matthew-carbery/

The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 1st Edition

Jonathan Lethem

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-best-american-mystery-
stories-2019-1st-edition-jonathan-lethem/

Prairie Imperialists The Indian Country Origins of

American Empire Katharine Bjork

https://textbookfull.com/product/prairie-imperialists-the-indian-
country-origins-of-american-empire-katharine-bjork/

Dreaming in Indian contemporary Native American voices

Third Printing Edition Charleyboy

https://textbookfull.com/product/dreaming-in-indian-contemporary-
native-american-voices-third-printing-edition-charleyboy/
 Introduction copyright © 2019 by Layli Long Soldier
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Modern Library and the Torchbearer colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9781984854216
Ebook ISBN 9781984854421
modernlibrary.com
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Rachel Ake
Cover photograph: Gertrude Käsebier

v5.4_r1
ep
 Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction

Impressions of an Indian Childhood

The School Days of an Indian Girl
An Indian Teacher Among Indians
The Great Spirit
The Soft-Hearted Sioux
The Trial Path
A Warrior’s Daughter
A Dream of Her Grandfather
The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman
America’s Indian Problem

Selected Poetry
A Ballad
Iris of Life
The Indian’s Awakening
The Red Man’s America
A Sioux Woman’s Love for Her Grandchild

About the Author

 INTRODUCTION
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

Entering Zitkála-Šá’s work is a piercing experience. She was born

into, educated by, and lived through some of the most dramatic—one
would say genocidal—changes for our people. At times while reading
I have to swallow, stop, and close the book. I must let her work rest,
let my body rest, and enter again slowly. As a Lakota and as a
woman, I feel a personal connection and literary lineage to Zitkála-
Šá. Likewise, we share tribal kinship through the Očeti Šakowin, so
her writing often stirs in me an unexplainable vulnerability and
empathy. Yet to the thoughtful reader of any heritage her work offers
testament to the power of language, documentation, resistance, and
maintaining a tenacious hold on cultural values.

To feel deeply the import of Zitkála-Šá’s writing, one should engage

in a spectral reading, a movement through and fluid flipping back
and forth from her short stories and poems to her nonfiction. Doing
this, we get a sense, a fragrance, of her spirit. By spirit is meant her
intent. Her drive and motivations. In “The School Days of an Indian
Girl,” Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical account of her boarding school
experience, she writes, “I ventured upon a college career against my
mother’s will. I had written for her approval, but in her reply I found
no encouragement….Her few words hinted that I had better give up
my slow attempt to learn the white man’s ways, and be content to
roam over the prairies and find my living upon wild roots. I silenced
her by deliberate disobedience.” From this we can cross-thread a
kind of discourse into “The Soft-Hearted Sioux.” As the protagonist,
a young Sioux man converted to Christianity through mission school,
sits at an open fire with his parents, his grandmother fills her stone
pipe and asks, “My grandchild, when are you going to bring here a
handsome young woman?” His response is that tense and familiar
thread of silence: “I stared into the fire rather than meet her gaze….I
said nothing in reply.” And to his father’s urging that he assume his
role as a warrior, the soft-hearted Sioux admits, “Not a word had I to
give in answer.” It’s here that we sense the primary and most ruinous
conflict of Zitkála-Šá’s time: the unsettling inside the homes,
families, and communities of Native people. The most gruesome
conflict, make no mistake, was within the self, in the individual heart
that was, at one time, culturally defined by connection to others.
Native people of Zitkála-Šá’s era had to dig, search, and come to
terms with what they were capable of, which was sometimes
unspeakable. What would we say to one another, in our families—
what words would ever surface from our throats—to explain the
choices Zitkála-Šá’s generation had to make? We may wish to
consider that in moments of rupture and devastation (e.g.,
earthquake, volcanic eruption, heartbreak, settler invasion) there are
often no words, only the sudden and unimaginable upheaval. Then a
violent tearing and breaking. Then silence. All is still. This silence
hangs in the air, in the body, until the senses snap alive. And we find
ourselves spinning around, frantically, to survey what remains. It’s
an echo of what the soft-hearted Sioux cried: “The moon and stars
began to move. Now the white prairie was sky, and the stars lay
under my feet. Now again they were turning. At last the starry blue
rose up into place. The noise in my ears was still. A great quiet filled
the air. In my hand I found my long knife dripping with blood.”

We ponder the essential grit and wound of Zitkála-Šá’s time to

understand that her writing was never a fanciful, privileged
exploration of an imagined Other. Rather, her work was a coal bed,
searing with embers of experience, and has become documentation
for future generations of the fires she walked through. In her own
breaking—namely, her separation from Dakota homelife into
boarding school—Zitkála-Šá explains that “the melancholy of those
black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years
that have since gone by.” We think about this wound not to
permanently fix her work in grief, but to understand that it was
essential to her writing, her activism, and her life’s purpose. She took
up the physical pen and paper, the objects of the “white man’s ways,”
and embraced the very education that came from those black days.
Yet hers was not a naïve and grinning acceptance of these tools. In
accounts of her childhood, we know that Zitkála-Šá displayed a
prodigious sense of how and when to enact subversion and revenge.
Tormented by Christian doctrine that seeped into dreams about the
devil, for example, she took a pencil from her apron pocket one
morning and pulled a copy of The Stories of the Bible down from a
shelf. In her words, “I began by scratching out his wicked eyes. A few
moments later…there was a ragged hole in the page where the
picture of the devil had once been.” Here we see subversion. As in,
who would find the ragged hole? Or when would this page be
discovered? And who knows if the book, tucked into a shelf, would
ever be opened to that page again anyway? But more important, she
responded to the dream. She excised its power over her by taking
action. Zitkála-Šá herself names this as revenge. While some may
reject or shy away from notions of revenge, we must also remember
that when enacted with a certain poetic sensibility and strength,
revenge can be a teacher. For us, Zitkála-Šá has dug a hole into the
page. She has scratched the eyes out of the devil. When we hold her
page, thus, a light streams through.

Let’s also consider the tone and language that Zitkála-Šá employed.
In her approach there is, at times, a gentleness and a conscious,
nonthreatening invitation to the non-Native reader that could
alternately be interpreted as appeasing, submissive kowtowing, or,
worse, a diminishment of the importance of her truth-telling. In “The
Great Spirit,” for example, she muses about her walks in the green
hills along the Missouri River, immersed in the natural beauty of
Creation itself. She writes with wonder, gazing “with a child’s eager
eye.” Here the perspective is deeply reflective, intimately told
through the personal I. However, as she recounts a traditional
Dakota story about Stone-Boy, she shifts into the explanatory mode,
clearly narrating for non-Native readers. Her word choice could be
viewed as teetering toward othering the Native perspective, in
moments such as “Here the Stone-Boy, of whom the American
aborigine tells…” Or “…with the thread of this Indian legend of the
rock, I fain would trace a subtle knowledge of the native folk…” And
so on. In contemporary conversations, this approach may be viewed
as unnecessary, or perhaps, in the most severe discussions, as a kind
of pandering. As in, why explain? Why not just say the say?
Yet, given Zitkála-Šá’s background, I am prone to credit her with
an exacting intelligence. I’m inclined to think that she knew precisely
what she was doing and the effect of each word; that she wielded her
tools purposefully; and that her driving intent was not to appease
but, consistent with her larger body of work, to make a statement
aimed directly at the forehead of colonialism.
Because in “The Great Spirit,” as much as in her other stories,
Zitkála-Šá braids together a theology for the Dakota belief system,
while also exposing the gaping split between Christian and Dakota
spiritual philosophies. About “the wild prairie flowers” she writes,
“Their quaint round faces of varied hue convince the heart which
leaps with glad surprise that they, too, are living symbols of
omnipotent thought.” Inspired by this, she concedes, “I feel in keen
sympathy with my fellow-creatures, for I seem to see clearly again
that all are akin.” Skillful with the narrative line, Zitkála-Šá unfolds
for her readers the “omnipotent thought” that structures Dakota
existence. Kinship and relationships are the life-pulse, and kinship
extends beyond the “mosaic of human beings” to include all of
creation equally. Yet she doesn’t allow us to rest there. This is also
the stage upon which she directs a heated spotlight on a Native
preacher’s attempts to bring her into the church through fear of
“torturing flames” and the “after-doom of hell fire,” and a missionary
paper in which a “ ‘Christian’ pugilist commented upon a recent
article of mine,” she says, “grossly perverting the spirit of my pen.”
So we must not miss the spirit of Zitkála-Šá’s pen: her nod to a non-
Native audience is not meant to pander, but is a fierce speaking-to.
The explanatory mode is arguably necessary, as it is the tool for
dead-on clarity. She knew her audience and, thus, harnessed
opportunity. She was intrepid and unfaltering in her hold on cultural
values and Dakota worldview. For us, Zitkála-Šá has set an example.
And for us, she carved out her rightful space to say, “I drink in the
myriad star shapes wrought in luxuriant color upon the green.
Beautiful is the spiritual essence they embody.”

We must understand that for Zitkála-Šá, her spiritual truths and

political truths inhabited the same spaces; they functioned
synchronistically. Zitkála-Šá has mournfully written, “For the white
man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these
same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On
account of my mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave
her up, also.” Yet we must also know by now that this is not purely
confessional, solely for personal mourning. We know that Zitkála-Šá
used the material of her own life to speak to the greater collective
losses and strengths of her people. Even in her astonishingly
personal admissions, she would bravely pivot to statements like “Few
there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-
lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization.” In the
aftermath of the devastation, rupture, silence, and spinning of her
generation, we can see this. Yes, because of Zitkála-Šá, thankfully we
do.

LAYLI LONG SOLDIER holds a BFA from the Institute of American

Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have
appeared in Poetry magazine, The New York Times, American Poets,
The American Reader, KROnline, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is the
recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist
Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Whiting Award, and
was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. Most recently, she
received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a 2017 National
Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of Chromosomory
(Q Avenue Press, 2010) and Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017). She
lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
 IMPRESSIONS OF AN INDIAN CHILDHOOD

I
MY MOTHER

A wigwam of weather-stained canvas stood at the base of some

irregularly ascending hills. A footpath wound its way gently down the
sloping land till it reached the broad river bottom; creeping through
the long swamp grasses that bent over it on either side, it came out
on the edge of the Missouri.
Here, morning, noon, and evening, my mother came to draw
water from the muddy stream for our household use. Always, when
my mother started for the river, I stopped my play to run along with
her. She was only of medium height. Often she was sad and silent, at
which times her full arched lips were compressed into hard and
bitter lines, and shadows fell under her black eyes. Then I clung to
her hand and begged to know what made the tears fall.
“Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears”; and
smiling through them, she patted my head and said, “Now let me see
how fast you can run today.” Whereupon I tore away at my highest
possible speed, with my long black hair blowing in the breeze.
I was a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown
buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I
was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a
bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride,—my wild freedom
and overflowing spirits. She taught me no fear save that of intruding
myself upon others.
 Having gone many paces ahead I stopped, panting for breath, and
laughing with glee as my mother watched my every movement. I was
not wholly conscious of myself, but was more keenly alive to the fire
within. It was as if I were the activity, and my hands and feet were
only experiments for my spirit to work upon.
Returning from the river, I tugged beside my mother, with my
hand upon the bucket I believed I was carrying. One time, on such a
return, I remember a bit of conversation we had. My grown-up
cousin, Warca-Ziwin (Sunflower), who was then seventeen, always
went to the river alone for water for her mother. Their wigwam was
not far from ours; and I saw her daily going to and from the river. I
admired my cousin greatly. So I said: “Mother, when I am tall as my
cousin Warca-Ziwin, you shall not have to come for water. I will do it
for you.”
With a strange tremor in her voice which I could not understand,
she answered, “If the paleface does not take away from us the river
we drink.”
“Mother, who is this bad paleface?” I asked.
“My little daughter, he is a sham,—a sickly sham! The bronzed
Dakota is the only real man.”
I looked up into my mother’s face while she spoke; and seeing her
bite her lips, I knew she was unhappy. This aroused revenge in my
small soul. Stamping my foot on the earth, I cried aloud, “I hate the
paleface that makes my mother cry!”
Setting the pail of water on the ground, my mother stooped, and
stretching her left hand out on the level with my eyes, she placed her
other arm about me; she pointed to the hill where my uncle and my
only sister lay buried.
“There is what the paleface has done! Since then your father too
has been buried in a hill nearer the rising sun. We were once very
happy. But the paleface has stolen our lands and driven us hither.
Having defrauded us of our land, the paleface forced us away.
“Well, it happened on the day we moved camp that your sister and
uncle were both very sick. Many others were ailing, but there seemed
to be no help. We traveled many days and nights; not in the grand,
happy way that we moved camp when I was a little girl, but we were
driven, my child, driven like a herd of buffalo. With every step, your
sister, who was not as large as you are now, shrieked with the painful
jar until she was hoarse with crying. She grew more and more
feverish. Her little hands and cheeks were burning hot. Her little lips
were parched and dry, but she would not drink the water I gave her.
Then I discovered that her throat was swollen and red. My poor
child, how I cried with her because the Great Spirit had forgotten us!
“At last, when we reached this western country, on the first weary
night your sister died. And soon your uncle died also, leaving a
widow and an orphan daughter, your cousin Warca-Ziwin. Both your
sister and uncle might have been happy with us today, had it not
been for the heartless paleface.”
My mother was silent the rest of the way to our wigwam. Though I
saw no tears in her eyes, I knew that was because I was with her. She
seldom wept before me.

II
THE LEGENDS

During the summer days my mother built her fire in the shadow of
our wigwam.
In the early morning our simple breakfast was spread upon the
grass west of our tepee. At the farthest point of the shade my mother
sat beside her fire, toasting a savory piece of dried meat. Near her, I
sat upon my feet, eating my dried meat with unleavened bread, and
drinking strong black coffee.
The morning meal was our quiet hour, when we two were entirely
alone. At noon, several who chanced to be passing by stopped to rest,
and to share our luncheon with us, for they were sure of our
hospitality.
 My uncle, whose death my mother ever lamented, was one of our
nation’s bravest warriors. His name was on the lips of old men when
talking of the proud feats of valor; and it was mentioned by younger
men, too, in connection with deeds of gallantry. Old women praised
him for his kindness toward them; young women held him up as an
ideal to their sweet-hearts. Every one loved him, and my mother
worshiped his memory. Thus it happened that even strangers were
sure of welcome in our lodge, if they but asked a favor in my uncle’s
name.
Though I heard many strange experiences related by these
wayfarers, I loved best the evening meal, for that was the time old
legends were told. I was always glad when the sun hung low in the
west, for then my mother sent me to invite the neighboring old men
and women to eat supper with us. Running all the way to the
wigwams, I halted shyly at the entrances. Sometimes I stood long
moments without saying a word. It was not any fear that made me so
dumb when out upon such a happy errand; nor was it that I wished
to withhold the invitation, for it was all I could do to observe this
very proper silence. But it was a sensing of the atmosphere, to assure
myself that I should not hinder other plans. My mother used to say to
me, as I was almost bounding away for the old people: “Wait a
moment before you invite any one. If other plans are being
discussed, do not interfere, but go elsewhere.”
The old folks knew the meaning of my pauses; and often they
coaxed my confidence by asking, “What do you seek, little
granddaughter?”
“My mother says you are to come to our tepee this evening,” I
instantly exploded, and breathed the freer afterwards.
“Yes, yes, gladly, gladly I shall come!” each replied. Rising at once
and carrying their blankets across one shoulder, they flocked
leisurely from their various wigwams toward our dwelling.
My mission done, I ran back, skipping and jumping with delight.
All out of breath, I told my mother almost the exact words of the
answers to my invitation. Frequently she asked, “What were they
doing when you entered their tepee?” This taught me to remember
all I saw at a single glance. Often I told my mother my impressions
without being questioned.
While in the neighboring wigwams sometimes an old Indian
woman asked me, “What is your mother doing?” Unless my mother
had cautioned me not to tell, I generally answered her questions
without reserve.
At the arrival of our guests I sat close to my mother, and did not
leave her side without first asking her consent. I ate my supper in
quiet, listening patiently to the talk of the old people, wishing all the
time that they would begin the stories I loved best. At last, when I
could not wait any longer, I whispered in my mother’s ear, “Ask them
to tell an Iktomi story, mother.”
Soothing my impatience, my mother said aloud, “My little
daughter is anxious to hear your legends.” By this time all were
through eating, and the evening was fast deepening into twilight.
As each in turn began to tell a legend, I pillowed my head in my
mother’s lap; and lying flat upon my back, I watched the stars as they
peeped down upon me, one by one. The increasing interest of the tale
aroused me, and I sat up eagerly listening to every word. The old
women made funny remarks, and laughed so heartily that I could not
help joining them.
The distant howling of a pack of wolves or the hooting of an owl in
the river bottom frightened me, and I nestled into my mother’s lap.
She added some dry sticks to the open fire, and the bright flames
leaped up into the faces of the old folks as they sat around in a great
circle.
On such an evening, I remember the glare of the fire shone on a
tattooed star upon the brow of the old warrior who was telling a
story. I watched him curiously as he made his unconscious gestures.
The blue star upon his bronzed forehead was a puzzle to me. Looking
about, I saw two parallel lines on the chin of one of the old women.
The rest had none. I examined my mother’s face, but found no sign
there.
 After the warrior’s story was finished, I asked the old woman the
meaning of the blue lines on her chin, looking all the while out of the
corners of my eyes at the warrior with the star on his forehead. I was
a little afraid that he would rebuke me for my boldness.
Here the old woman began: “Why, my grandchild, they are signs,
—secret signs I dare not tell you. I shall, however, tell you a
wonderful story about a woman who had a cross tattooed upon each
of her cheeks.”
It was a long story of a woman whose magic power lay hidden
behind the marks upon her face. I fell asleep before the story was
completed.
Ever after that night I felt suspicious of tattooed people. Wherever
I saw one I glanced furtively at the mark and round about it,
wondering what terrible magic power was covered there.
It was rarely that such a fearful story as this one was told by the
camp fire. Its impression was so acute that the picture still remains
vividly clear and pronounced.

III
THE BEADWORK

Soon after breakfast mother sometimes began her beadwork. On a

bright, clear day, she pulled out the wooden pegs that pinned the
skirt of our wigwam to the ground, and rolled the canvas part way up
on its frame of slender poles. Then the cool morning breezes swept
freely through our dwelling, now and then wafting the perfume of
sweet grasses from newly burnt prairie.
Untying the long tasseled strings that bound a small brown
buckskin bag, my mother spread upon a mat beside her bunches of
colored beads, just as an artist arranges the paints upon his palette.
On a lapboard she smoothed out a double sheet of soft white
buckskin; and drawing from a beaded case that hung on the left of
her wide belt a long, narrow blade, she trimmed the buckskin into
shape. Often she worked upon small moccasins for her small
daughter. Then I became intensely interested in her designing. With
a proud, beaming face, I watched her work. In imagination, I saw
myself walking in a new pair of snugly fitting moccasins. I felt the
envious eyes of my playmates upon the pretty red beads decorating
my feet.
Close beside my mother I sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin in
one hand and an awl in the other. This was the beginning of my
practical observation lessons in the art of beadwork. From a skein of
finely twisted threads of silvery sinews my mother pulled out a single
one. With an awl she pierced the buckskin, and skillfully threaded it
with the white sinew. Picking up the tiny beads one by one, she
strung them with the point of her thread, always twisting it carefully
after every stitch.
It took many trials before I learned how to knot my sinew thread
on the point of my finger, as I saw her do. Then the next difficulty
was in keeping my thread stiffly twisted, so that I could easily string
my beads upon it. My mother required of me original designs for my
lessons in beading. At first I frequently ensnared many a sunny hour
into working a long design. Soon I learned from self-inflicted
punishment to refrain from drawing complex patterns, for I had to
finish whatever I began.
After some experience I usually drew easy and simple crosses and
squares. These were some of the set forms. My original designs were
not always symmetrical nor sufficiently characteristic, two faults
with which my mother had little patience. The quietness of her
oversight made me feel strongly responsible and dependent upon my
own judgment. She treated me as a dignified little individual as long
as I was on my good behavior; and how humiliated I was when some
boldness of mine drew forth a rebuke from her!
In the choice of colors she left me to my own taste. I was pleased
with an outline of yellow upon a background of dark blue, or a
combination of red and myrtle-green. There was another of red with
a bluish-gray that was more conventionally used. When I became a
little familiar with designing and the various pleasing combinations
of color, a harder lesson was given me. It was the sewing on, instead
of beads, some tinted porcupine quills, moistened and flattened
between the nails of the thumb and forefinger. My mother cut off the
prickly ends and burned them at once in the center fire. These sharp
points were poisonous, and worked into the flesh wherever they
lodged. For this reason, my mother said, I should not do much alone
in quills until I was as tall as my cousin Warca-Ziwin.
Always after these confining lessons I was wild with surplus
spirits, and found joyous relief in running loose in the open again.
Many a summer afternoon a party of four or five of my playmates
roamed over the hills with me. We each carried a light sharpened rod
about four feet long, with which we pried up certain sweet roots.
When we had eaten all the choice roots we chanced upon, we
shouldered our rods and strayed off into patches of a stalky plant
under whose yellow blossoms we found little crystal drops of gum.
Drop by drop we gathered this nature’s rock-candy, until each of us
could boast of a lump the size of a small bird’s egg. Soon satiated
with its woody flavor, we tossed away our gum, to return again to the
sweet roots.
I remember well how we used to exchange our necklaces, beaded
belts, and sometimes even our moccasins. We pretended to offer
them as gifts to one another. We delighted in impersonating our own
mothers. We talked of things we had heard them say in their
conversations. We imitated their various manners, even to the
inflection of their voices. In the lap of the prairie we seated ourselves
upon our feet, and leaning our painted cheeks in the palms of our
hands, we rested our elbows on our knees, and bent forward as old
women were most accustomed to do.
While one was telling of some heroic deed recently done by a near
relative, the rest of us listened attentively, and exclaimed in
undertones, “Han! han!” (yes! yes!) whenever the speaker paused for
breath, or sometimes for our sympathy. As the discourse became
more thrilling, according to our ideas, we raised our voices in these
interjections. In these impersonations our parents were led to say
only those things that were in common favor.
No matter how exciting a tale we might be rehearsing, the mere
shifting of a cloud shadow in the landscape near by was sufficient to
change our impulses; and soon we were all chasing the great
shadows that played among the hills. We shouted and whooped in
the chase; laughing and calling to one another, we were like little
sportive nymphs on that Dakota sea of rolling green.
On one occasion I forgot the cloud shadow in a strange notion to
catch up with my own shadow. Standing straight and still, I began to
glide after it, putting out one foot cautiously. When, with the greatest
care, I set my foot in advance of myself, my shadow crept onward
too. Then again I tried it; this time with the other foot. Still again my
shadow escaped me. I began to run; and away flew my shadow,
always just a step beyond me. Faster and faster I ran, setting my
teeth and clenching my fists, determined to overtake my own fleet
shadow. But ever swifter it glided before me, while I was growing
breathless and hot. Slackening my speed, I was greatly vexed that my
shadow should check its pace also. Daring it to the utmost, as I
thought, I sat down upon a rock imbedded in the hillside.
So! my shadow had the impudence to sit down beside me!
Now my comrades caught up with me, and began to ask why I was
running away so fast.
“Oh, I was chasing my shadow! Didn’t you ever do that?” I
inquired, surprised that they should not understand.
They planted their moccasined feet firmly upon my shadow to
stay it, and I arose. Again my shadow slipped away, and moved as
often as I did. Then we gave up trying to catch my shadow.
Before this peculiar experience I have no distinct memory of
having recognized any vital bond between myself and my own
shadow. I never gave it an afterthought.
Returning our borrowed belts and trinkets, we rambled
homeward. That evening, as on other evenings, I went to sleep over
my legends.
 IV
THE COFFEE-MAKING

One summer afternoon my mother left me alone in our wigwam

while she went across the way to my aunt’s dwelling.
I did not much like to stay alone in our tepee for I feared a tall,
broad-shouldered crazy man, some forty years old, who walked loose
among the hills. Wiyaka-Napbina (Wearer of a Feather Necklace)
was harmless, and whenever he came into a wigwam he was driven
there by extreme hunger. He went nude except for the half of a red
blanket he girdled around his waist. In one tawny arm he used to
carry a heavy bunch of wild sunflowers that he gathered in his
aimless ramblings. His black hair was matted by the winds, and
scorched into a dry red by the constant summer sun. As he took great
strides, placing one brown bare foot directly in front of the other, he
swung his long lean arm to and fro.
Frequently he paused in his walk and gazed far backward, shading
his eyes with his hand. He was under the belief that an evil spirit was
haunting his steps. This was what my mother told me once, when I
sneered at such a silly big man. I was brave when my mother was
near by, and Wiyaka-Napbina walking farther and farther away.
“Pity the man, my child. I knew him when he was a brave and
handsome youth. He was overtaken by a malicious spirit among the
hills, one day, when he went hither and thither after his ponies. Since
then he can not stay away from the hills,” she said.
I felt so sorry for the man in his misfortune that I prayed to the
Great Spirit to restore him. But though I pitied him at a distance, I
was still afraid of him when he appeared near our wigwam.
Thus, when my mother left me by myself that afternoon I sat in a
fearful mood within our tepee. I recalled all I had ever heard about
Wiyaka-Napbina; and I tried to assure myself that though he might
pass near by, he would not come to our wigwam because there was
no little girl around our grounds.
Just then, from without a hand lifted the canvas covering of the
entrance; the shadow of a man fell within the wigwam, and a large
roughly moccasined foot was planted inside.
For a moment I did not dare to breathe or stir, for I thought that
could be no other than Wiyaka-Napbina. The next instant I sighed
aloud in relief. It was an old grandfather who had often told me
Iktomi legends.
“Where is your mother, my little grandchild?” were his first
words.
“My mother is soon coming back from my aunt’s tepee,” I replied.
“Then I shall wait awhile for her return,” he said, crossing his feet
and seating himself upon a mat.
At once I began to play the part of a generous hostess. I turned to
my mother’s coffeepot.
Lifting the lid, I found nothing but coffee grounds in the bottom. I
set the pot on a heap of cold ashes in the center, and filled it half full
of warm Missouri River water. During this performance I felt
conscious of being watched. Then breaking off a small piece of our
unleavened bread, I placed it in a bowl. Turning soon to the
coffeepot, which would never have boiled on a dead fire had I waited
forever, I poured out a cup of worse than muddy warm water.
Carrying the bowl in one hand and cup in the other, I handed the
light luncheon to the old warrior. I offered them to him with the air
of bestowing generous hospitality.
“How! how!” he said, and placed the dishes on the ground in front
of his crossed feet. He nibbled at the bread and sipped from the cup.
I sat back against a pole watching him. I was proud to have
succeeded so well in serving refreshments to a guest all by myself.
Before the old warrior had finished eating, my mother entered.
Immediately she wondered where I had found coffee, for she knew I
had never made any, and that she had left the coffeepot empty.
Answering the question in my mother’s eyes, the warrior remarked,
“My granddaughter made coffee on a heap of dead ashes, and served
me the moment I came.”
They both laughed, and mother said, “Wait a little longer, and I
shall build a fire.” She meant to make some real coffee. But neither
she nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to
partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me.
They treated my best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost
respect. It was not till long years afterward that I learned how
ridiculous a thing I had done.

V
THE DEAD MAN’S PLUM BUSH

One autumn afternoon many people came streaming toward the

dwelling of our near neighbor. With painted faces, and wearing
broad white bosoms of elk’s teeth, they hurried down the narrow
footpath to Haraka Wambdi’s wigwam. Young mothers held their
children by the hand, and half pulled them along in their haste. They
overtook and passed by the bent old grandmothers who were
trudging along with crooked canes toward the center of excitement.
Most of the young braves galloped hither on their ponies. Toothless
warriors, like the old women, came more slowly, though mounted on
lively ponies. They sat proudly erect on their horses. They wore their
eagle plumes, and waved their various trophies of former wars.
In front of the wigwam a great fire was built, and several large
black kettles of venison were suspended over it. The crowd were
seated about it on the grass in a great circle. Behind them some of
the braves stood leaning against the necks of their ponies, their tall
figures draped in loose robes which were well drawn over their eyes.
Young girls, with their faces glowing like bright red autumn
leaves, their glossy braids falling over each ear, sat coquettishly
beside their chaperons. It was a custom for young Indian women to
invite some older relative to escort them to the public feasts. Though
it was not an iron law, it was generally observed.
Haraka Wambdi was a strong young brave, who had just returned
from his first battle, a warrior. His near relatives, to celebrate his
new rank, were spreading a feast to which the whole of the Indian
village was invited.
Holding my pretty striped blanket in readiness to throw over my
shoulders, I grew more and more restless as I watched the gay throng
assembling. My mother was busily broiling a wild duck that my aunt
had that morning brought over.
“Mother, mother, why do you stop to cook a small meal when we
are invited to a feast?” I asked, with a snarl in my voice.
“My child, learn to wait. On our way to the celebration we are
going to stop at Chanyu’s wigwam. His aged mother-in-law is lying
very ill, and I think she would like a taste of this small game.”
Having once seen the suffering on the thin, pinched features of
this dying woman, I felt a momentary shame that I had not
remembered her before.
On our way I ran ahead of my mother and was reaching out my
hand to pick some purple plums that grew on a small bush, when I
was checked by a low “Sh!” from my mother.
“Why, mother, I want to taste the plums!” I exclaimed, as I
dropped my hand to my side in disappointment.
“Never pluck a single plum from this brush, my child, for its roots
are wrapped around an Indian’s skeleton. A brave is buried here.
While he lived he was so fond of playing the game of striped plum
seeds that, at his death, his set of plum seeds were buried in his
hands. From them sprang up this little bush.”
Eyeing the forbidden fruit, I trod lightly on the sacred ground,
and dared to speak only in whispers until we had gone many paces
from it. After that time I halted in my ramblings whenever I came in
sight of the plum bush. I grew sober with awe, and was alert to hear a
long-drawn-out whistle rise from the roots of it. Though I had never
heard with my own ears this strange whistle of departed spirits, yet I
had listened so frequently to hear the old folks describe it that I knew
I should recognize it at once.
The lasting impression of that day, as I recall it now, is what my
mother told me about the dead man’s plum bush.
 VI
THE GROUND SQUIRREL

In the busy autumn days my cousin Warca-Ziwin’s mother came to

our wigwam to help my mother preserve foods for our winter use. I
was very fond of my aunt, because she was not so quiet as my
mother. Though she was older, she was more jovial and less
reserved. She was slender and remarkably erect. While my mother’s
hair was heavy and black, my aunt had unusually thin locks.
Ever since I knew her she wore a string of large blue beads around
her neck,—beads that were precious because my uncle had given
them to her when she was a younger woman. She had a peculiar
swing in her gait, caused by a long stride rarely natural to so slight a
figure. It was during my aunt’s visit with us that my mother forgot
her accustomed quietness, often laughing heartily at some of my
aunt’s witty remarks.
I loved my aunt threefold: for her hearty laughter, for the
cheerfulness she caused my mother, and most of all for the times she
dried my tears and held me in her lap, when my mother had
reproved me.
Early in the cool mornings, just as the yellow rim of the sun rose
above the hills, we were up and eating our breakfast. We awoke so
early that we saw the sacred hour when a misty smoke hung over a
pit surrounded by an impassable sinking mire. This strange smoke
appeared every morning, both winter and summer; but most visibly
in midwinter it rose immediately above the marshy spot. By the time
the full face of the sun appeared above the eastern horizon, the
smoke vanished. Even very old men, who had known this country the
longest, said that the smoke from this pit had never failed a single
day to rise heavenward.
As I frolicked about our dwelling I used to stop suddenly, and
with a fearful awe watch the smoking of the unknown fires. While the
vapor was visible I was afraid to go very far from our wigwam unless
I went with my mother.
 From a field in the fertile river bottom my mother and aunt
gathered an abundant supply of corn. Near our tepee they spread a
large canvas upon the grass, and dried their sweet corn in it. I was
left to watch the corn, that nothing should disturb it. I played around
it with dolls made of ears of corn. I braided their soft fine silk for
hair, and gave them blankets as various as the scraps I found in my
mother’s workbag.
There was a little stranger with a black-and-yellow-striped coat
that used to come to the drying corn. It was a little ground squirrel,
who was so fearless of me that he came to one corner of the canvas
and carried away as much of the sweet corn as he could hold. I
wanted very much to catch him and rub his pretty fur back, but my
mother said he would be so frightened if I caught him that he would
bite my fingers. So I was as content as he to keep the corn between
us. Every morning he came for more corn. Some evenings I have
seen him creeping about our grounds; and when I gave a sudden
whoop of recognition he ran quickly out of sight.
When mother had dried all the corn she wished, then she sliced
great pumpkins into thin rings; and these she doubled and linked
together into long chains. She hung them on a pole that stretched
between two forked posts. The wind and sun soon thoroughly dried
the chains of pumpkin. Then she packed them away in a case of thick
and stiff buckskin.
In the sun and wind she also dried many wild fruits,—cherries,
berries, and plums. But chiefest among my early recollections of
autumn is that one of the corn drying and the ground squirrel.
I have few memories of winter days at this period of my life,
though many of the summer. There is one only which I can recall.
Some missionaries gave me a little bag of marbles. They were all
sizes and colors. Among them were some of colored glass. Walking
with my mother to the river, on a late winter day, we found great
chunks of ice piled all along the bank. The ice on the river was
floating in huge pieces. As I stood beside one large block, I noticed
for the first time the colors of the rainbow in the crystal ice.
Immediately I thought of my glass marbles at home. With my bare
fingers I tried to pick out some of the colors, for they seemed so near
the surface. But my fingers began to sting with the intense cold, and I
had to bite them hard to keep from crying.
From that day on, for many a moon, I believed that glass marbles
had river ice inside of them.

VII
THE BIG RED APPLES

The first turning away from the easy, natural flow of my life occurred
in an early spring. It was in my eighth year; in the month of March, I
afterward learned. At this age I knew but one language, and that was
my mother’s native tongue.
From some of my playmates I heard that two paleface
missionaries were in our village. They were from that class of white
men who wore big hats and carried large hearts, they said. Running
direct to my mother, I began to question her why these two strangers
were among us. She told me, after I had teased much, that they had
come to take away Indian boys and girls to the East. My mother did
not seem to want me to talk about them. But in a day or two, I
gleaned many wonderful stories from my playfellows concerning the
strangers.
“Mother, my friend Judéwin is going home with the missionaries.
She is going to a more beautiful country than ours; the palefaces told
her so!” I said wistfully, wishing in my heart that I too might go.
Mother sat in a chair, and I was hanging on her knee. Within the
last two seasons my big brother Dawée had returned from a three
years’ education in the East, and his coming back influenced my
mother to take a farther step from her native way of living. First it
was a change from the buffalo skin to the white man’s canvas that
covered our wigwam. Now she had given up her wigwam of slender
poles, to live, a foreigner, in a home of clumsy logs.
 “Yes, my child, several others besides Judéwin are going away
with the palefaces. Your brother said the missionaries had inquired
about his little sister,” she said, watching my face very closely.
My heart thumped so hard against my breast, I wondered if she
could hear it.
“Did he tell them to take me, mother?” I asked, fearing lest Dawée
had forbidden the palefaces to see me, and that my hope of going to
the Wonderland would be entirely blighted.
With a sad, slow smile, she answered: “There! I knew you were
wishing to go, because Judéwin has filled your ears with the white
man’s lies. Don’t believe a word they say! Their words are sweet, but,
my child, their deeds are bitter. You will cry for me, but they will not
even soothe you. Stay with me, my little one! Your brother Dawée
says that going East, away from your mother, is too hard an
experience for his baby sister.”
Thus my mother discouraged my curiosity about the lands beyond
our eastern horizon; for it was not yet an ambition for Letters that
was stirring me. But on the following day the missionaries did come
to our very house. I spied them coming up the footpath leading to
our cottage. A third man was with them, but he was not my brother
Dawée. It was another, a young interpreter, a paleface who had a
smattering of the Indian language. I was ready to run out to meet
them, but I did not dare to displease my mother. With great glee, I
jumped up and down on our ground floor. I begged my mother to
open the door, that they would be sure to come to us. Alas! They
came, they saw, and they conquered!
Judéwin had told me of the great tree where grew red, red apples;
and how we could reach out our hands and pick all the red apples we
could eat. I had never seen apple trees. I had never tasted more than
a dozen red apples in my life; and when I heard of the orchards of the
East, I was eager to roam among them. The missionaries smiled into
my eyes and patted my head. I wondered how mother could say such
hard words against him.
“Mother, ask them if little girls may have all the red apples they
want, when they go East,” I whispered aloud, in my excitement.
 The interpreter heard me, and answered: “Yes, little girl, the nice
red apples are for those who pick them; and you will have a ride on
the iron horse if you go with these good people.”
I had never seen a train, and he knew it.
“Mother, I am going East! I like big red apples, and I want to ride
on the iron horse! Mother, say yes!” I pleaded.
My mother said nothing. The missionaries waited in silence; and
my eyes began to blur with tears, though I struggled to choke them
back. The corners of my mouth twitched, and my mother saw me.
“I am not ready to give you any word,” she said to them.
“Tomorrow I shall send you my answer by my son.”
With this they left us. Alone with my mother, I yielded to my
tears, and cried aloud, shaking my head so as not to hear what she
was saying to me. This was the first time I had ever been so unwilling
to give up my own desire that I refused to hearken to my mother’s
voice.
There was a solemn silence in our home that night. Before I went
to bed I begged the Great Spirit to make my mother willing I should
go with the missionaries.
The next morning came, and my mother called me to her side.
“My daughter, do you still persist in wishing to leave your mother?”
she asked.
“Oh, mother, it is not that I wish to leave you, but I want to see the
wonderful Eastern land,” I answered.
My dear old aunt came to our house that morning, and I heard
her say, “Let her try it.”
I hoped that, as usual, my aunt was pleading on my side. My
brother Dawée came for mother’s decision. I dropped my play, and
crept close to my aunt.
“Yes, Dawée, my daughter, though she does not understand what
it all means, is anxious to go. She will need an education when she is
grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more
palefaces. This tearing her away, so young, from her mother is
necessary, if I would have her an educated woman. The palefaces,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 fatty degen.
vessels. Sclerosis
ant. columns.
Atrophy ant. roots.
Foci of softening
in ant. cornua.
Roger and Fatty degen.
29 1871 2 2½ Variola. Both legs. Ibid.
Damaschino. blood-vessels,
circumscribed
myelitis.
Roger and Foci of softening,
30 1871 2 3 Fever. Ibid. Ibid.
Damaschino. as above.
Focus myelitis on
both sides.
Disappearance Virch. Arch.,
31 1873 Roth. 1 2 Ibid. Ibid. ganglion-cells, 1873, Bd.
abundant lviii.
exudation
corpuscles.
Extensive myelitis
ant. and central Med.-Chir.
After
32 1868 L. Clarke. 1 32 Both arms. part gray matter. Trans., li. p.
inoculation.
Disappearance 219.
ganglion-cells.
Atrophy lumbar
cord ant. lat.
columns. Atrophy
Virch.
Acute ganglion-cells.
33 1876 Schultze. 3 22 Both legs. Archiv, Bd.
disease. Abundant exud.
lxviii., 1876.
corpuscles.
Proliferation
neuroglia.
34 1876 Leyden. 2 60 Fall from L. leg. Circumscribed Archiv f.
table. cicatrix with Psych.,
complete 1876, Bd. vi.
destruction gray
substance.
Amyloid
 degeneration.
Atrophy ant. roots.
Atrophy ganglion-
cells. Cellular
35 1876 Leyden. ¾ 1¾ Suddenly. L. leg. diffused infilt. Ibid.
(myelitis) gray
subst'ce.
Amyloid infiltration
ant. horns,
atrophy ganglion-
Sudden
36 1876 Leyden. 4 58 L. leg. cells left lumbar Ibid.
over night.
horn. Diffuse
atrophy gray
substance.
Sclerotic focus in
right lumbar and
in left cerv. region.
R. leg, L. Diffuse meningo-
37 1876 Leyden. 3 20 Ibid. Ibid.
arm. myelitis. Atrophy
ant. lat. columns.
Encapsulated
myelitis.
Purulent focus in
Quoted by
ant. cornua
Seeligmüller,
38 1876 Demme. ? 3½ ? — lumbar region.
loc. cit., p.
Atrophy ganglion-
18.
cells.
Diffuse
inflammation
39 1876 Eisenlohr. ? ¾ ? B. legs. Ibid.
anterior horns and
ant. lat. columns.
Myelitic
disorganization Trans. Path.
40 1879 Turner. 2½ 2¾ ? gray substance Soc. Lond.,
ant. cornua 1879.
lumbar cord.
41 1883 Archambault 30 m's 31 m's, Malaise Left leg Focus red Le Union
et or 26 and and right softening ant. médicale,
Damaschino. arm. horns left lumbar; 1883.
 d'ys fr. prostration right cervical
début. one day. region. Enormous
enlargement
vascular network,
and distension
blood-vessels;
granular
corpuscles in
lymphatic
sheaths; marked
atrophy cells and
of myeline
sheaths of fibres
in ant. roots;
myeline balls in
sheath; axis-
cylinders
disappeared.
Lesions more or
less marked
throughout cord.
Nerves not
examined.
Red area both
anterior cornua
lumbar region.
Fever and Here distension Trans. Path.
42 1884 Money. 2 yrs. 28 m's. vomiting Paraplegia. and thrombosis Soc. Lond.,
for a week. vessels; infiltration 1884.
leucocytes;
absence
multipolar cells.
1884 Money. Unknown 7 yrs. Unknown. Right leg. Wasting anterior
horn almost
throughout lumbar
region. Atrophy
cells chiefly in
ant., ant.-lat.,
post.-lateral, and
central groups,
 replaced by dense
nucleated tissue.

It will be useful to add another table, which will group together the cases
in which the autopsies were made within two years after the occurrence
of the paralysis. Of these, all but the two made by Laborde, in which the
cornua are declared to be healthy and the lesion limited to the white
columns, show traces of destructive morbid processes in the gray
substance of the cord, greatly predominating in the anterior cornua, but
not absolutely limited to them, nor even to the part of the cord which
corresponds to the paralyzed limb:

TABLE VI.
Date of Autopsy Year of
Case No. Name of Author. after Paralysis. Publication.
41 Damaschino. 6 weeks. 1883
40 Turner. 26 days. 1879
28 Roger and Damaschino. 2 mos. 1871
42 Money. 4 mos. 1884
27 Echeverria. 6 mos.
39 Eisenlohr. 6 mos.
29 Roger. 6 mos. 1871
31 Roth. 9 mos. 1873
35 Leyden. 11 mos. 1876
14 Bouvier and Laborde. 12 mos. 1864
30 Roger. 13 mos. 1871
15 Cornil and Laborde. 16 mos. 1864
12 Recklinghausen. 24 mos. 1863
38 Demme. 24 mos. 1876
23 Taylor. 18 mos. 1879
25 Humphrey. 24 mos. 1879

AUTOPSIES OF RELATIVELY RECENT CASES.—In cases relatively recent all

macroscopic changes in the cord may be entirely wanting. There may be
some degree of asymmetry in the surface of section, patches of white
coloration in the anterior gray substance, or of gray or yellow color in the
white columns; the anterior roots may be congested or even already
atrophied.94 On the other hand, there have several times been found foci
of visible red softening, much more frequently at a point corresponding to
the origin of the paralyzed nerves, but not absolutely confined to them,
and sometimes existing at points where they have given rise to no
symptoms whatever.95
94 Roger's first case, No. 28 of Table V.

95 Case 1st of Roger, Tab. V.

Microscopic Lesions.—In striking contrast with this paucity of macroscopic

lesions are the interesting structural changes revealed under the
microscope. These lesions are usually comprised within circumscribed
foci whose size may vary from a long diameter of 2 mm.96 to one of from
10 to 30 mm.97 Sometimes bilateral foci are found with monoplegic
paralysis; thus one side or the other preponderates in the morbid process.
96 Case Roth, Tab. V.

97 Case Schulze, Tab. V.

In recent cases (Damaschino's, at twenty-six days; Roger's, at two

months; Turner's, at six weeks) patches of red softening existed at the
portions of the cord containing the nuclei of origin of the paralyzed
nerves. In Turner's case the focus contained hemorrhagic extravasation,
and the traces of this were clearly perceptible in Roger's first case. The
blood-vessels are dilated; their lymphatic sheaths infiltrated with
leucocytes and with granular corpuscles; their walls are thickened,
pigmented, or fatty.

Leucocytes are often disseminated through the diseased area, and in one
case (Demme) were accumulated into a focus of pus. Besides the
leucocytes, the foci are often infiltrated with large round granular cells that
seem to be transformed neuroglia-cells (Leyden). In one case neuroglia
nuclei were accumulated in a ring around the focus, seeming to indicate
the beginning of encapsulation.

The most striking lesion, however, and the one which is common to the
most recent as well as to old cases, is the deformation, atrophy, and final
disappearance of the large ganglionic cells of the anterior cornua. The
first change consists in granular pigmentation;98 then the prolongations
disappear, leaving the body of the cell shrunken and deformed; at last the
whole cell disappears. Sometimes all the cells of an anterior horn have
disappeared throughout the entire depth of the focus; quite as often, in
certain sections at least, the atrophy is limited to certain groups, as the
external,99 or the external in one focus, the antero-lateral in another,
situated on the opposite side of the cord.100
98 Case of Echeverria, Tab. V.

99 Case by Schultze (this is a case of ancient lesion), Tab. V. (Virch. Arch., Bd. lviii.).

100 Case by Taylor, Tab. IV. (Path. Trans., London, 1879.)

In a case rendered celebrated by Charcot it is stated that in many

sections of the cord atrophy of ganglionic cells constituted the unique
alteration, the tissue immediately surrounding the place whence they had
disappeared being perfectly healthy. It is on this appearance that has
been built up the theory of a primary idiopathic atrophy of the ganglionic
cells as the characteristic lesion of infantile paralysis. But in other portions
of the same cord Charcot himself describes destruction of the gray
reticulum imbedding the cells; and this destruction is insisted upon in
many other observations. In other words, there is a general disintegration
of the gray nervous tissue of the anterior cornua which contain the focal
lesion. The normal tissue is then replaced by a reticulum of conjunctive
fibres, more or less dense according to the age of the case.

These focal lesions of the cord explain admirably, as will be seen, the
permanent symptoms of the disease. But of great importance for
understanding its initial period is the fact that structural changes—similar
to, but less severe than, those just described—have beer found diffused
throughout the cord. In several cases hyperæmia, partial atrophy of
ganglionic cells and nerve-fibres, infiltration with exudation corpuscles, in
the anterior cornua and even central gray canal from the lumbar to the
cervical region.101 In Damaschino's case, besides the focal lesions which
corresponded to the paralyses of the right arm and left leg, were others
corresponding to the left arm and right leg where no paralysis existed.
101 See cases by Leyden, Roth, Schultze, Clarke, Damaschino.

This case (1883) is also interesting in bringing out another lesion not
usually noticed. This is the breaking up into balls of the myeline in the
medullated tubes, both of the anterior intraspinal nerve-roots and of such
fibres as traversed the anterior nerves. In balsam preparations these
myeline drops are dissolved; but in osmic acid and glycerin preparations
they appear as black balls all over the field. The lesion is identical with
that already described by Dejerine (1875) in both nerves, roots, and white
columns. The columns of Clarke have always been found intact.

In the recent cases no lesions of the white columns have been observed
—a fact upon which reposes the doctrine that such lesions, when
existing, are secondary to those of the cornua.

SECOND GROUP OF CASES.—The next group of cases contains 16, where

the autopsy was made more than two years after the début of the
paralysis.

TABLE VII.—AUTOPSIES SHOWING LESIONS OLDER THAN TWO YEARS.

Year of
Case No. Name of Author. Date of Lesion. Publication.
11 Longet. 7 yrs. 1842
27 Echeverria. 7 yrs. 1866
43 Money. 7 yrs. 1884
16 Lancereaux. 16 yrs. 1873
38 Leyden. 17 yrs. 1876
33 Schultze. 19 yrs. 1876
17 Charcot and Joffroy. 25 yrs. 1870
20 Müller. 30 yrs. 1871
22 Clarke. 31 yrs. 1868
10 Hutin. 42 yrs. 1825
13 Cornil. 47 yrs. 1863
36 Leyden. 54 yrs.
34 Leyden. 58 yrs. 1876
19 Vulpian. 64 yrs. 1870
22 Raymond. 70 yrs. 1875
16 Prévost. 76 yrs. 1866

The date of these lesions varies from seven to seventy-six years. In two
or three cases, where the autopsy was made on very old people, the
early history of the disease was unknown, but the probable date of the
paralysis was calculated.
In this group of cases patches of atrophy, semi-transparent and grayish in
color, focal or diffused, are clearly perceptible to the naked eye. As a rule,
the atrophy is unilateral, and sensibly affects the entire half of the cord. In
some cases of paraplegia, however, there is a bilateral, symmetrical
shrinkage of the entire lumbar cord, which has been reduced to the size
of a quill.

The atrophy involves, first and most markedly, one or both anterior
cornua; second, the anterior nerve-roots arising from them; third, the
antero-lateral columns.

In both the latter localities the microscope will often find individual nerve-
tubes wasted and deprived of their myeline. The atrophied patches are
generally sclerosed as the seat of a proliferated neuroglia, coloring deeply
with carmine. In Laborde's cases, published at the very beginning of what
may be called the anatomical period, the atrophy and sclerosis were said
to be limited to the antero-lateral columns and the nerve-roots, while the
cornua remained intact. In all more recent observations, however, the
lesion of the white columns and roots has been found strictly proportioned
to that of the gray horns. The sclerosis extended into the latter,
constituted by a reticulum of connective-tissue fibres, sometimes fine,
sometimes so matted together as to form a dense felt-like substance,
sometimes offering the ordinary aspect of sclerosis.

Amyloid corpuscles have been found infiltrated in great numbers through

both the gray and white substance in these old cases (case by Cornil),102
seeming to replace the infiltration with exudation corpuscles observed in
the more recent ones.103 When the lesion is distinctly circumscribed the
focus is often surrounded by a zone of embryonic cells, seeming to
indicate a reactive proliferation on the periphery.104
102 Loc. cit., Soc. Biol.,1863.

103 Seguin (loc. cit.) observes that the opinion is gaining ground which ascribes these to a
transformation of the neuroglia corpuscles.

104 Case by Schultze, loc. cit.

As in the relatively fresh cases, the circumstance which has attracted the
most attention is the atrophy of the ganglionic cells from the sclerosed
patches of the anterior cornua. The completeness with which these have
disappeared in any focus seems to be proportioned to the completeness
of the paralysis in the corresponding limb. Partial atrophy or
disappearance of spinal groups of cells from the cornua may sometimes
be correlated with paralysis of special muscles.105
105 Thus in Schultze's case, already quoted, the external group of cells had disappeared
from the focus in one gray horn, and the extensors of the foot were alone paralyzed. This
seems to confirm the opinion advanced by Spitzka, that this external group of motor-cells
corresponds to the extensor, the internal groups to the flexor muscles.

Study of the pathology of infantile paralysis is not completed when the

above series of spinal lesions has been enumerated. Most various
interpretations have been made of these lesions as they have been
successively discovered. Thus, after the theory of congestion came the
theory of primary sclerosis, built upon Laborde's two autopsies;106 then
the theory of primary atrophy of ganglionic cells;107 then the theory of
myelitis;108 finally, a theory of complex and variable lesion.109
106 Laborde, loc. cit.; Cornil, loc. cit.

107 Charcot, Leçons sur les Maladies du Syst. nerveux; Prévost, Soc. Biol., 1864; Joffroy,
Arch. de Physiol., 1870; Petitfils, “De l'Atrophie aigue des Cellules matrices,” Thèse de
Paris, 1873.

108 Schultze, Virch. Arch., Bd. lxviii.; Roth, Ibid., Bd. lviii.; Henoch, loc. cit., p. 208; Ross, loc.
cit., p. 125; Seguin, loc. cit., 1877; Erb, Ziemssen's Handbuch; Seeligmüller, Gerhardt's
Handbuch; Roger and Damaschino, Gaz. méd., 1871; Turner, Path. Trans. Lond., 1879;
Hammond, loc. cit.

109 Leyden, Archiv für Psych., Bd. vi., 1876.

It was Prévost who first ascribed a predominant importance to the atrophy

of the ganglionic cells of the anterior cornua; but it was in the hands of
Vulpian, Joffroy, and more especially Charcot and his pupils, that the
theory was fully developed. Infantile paralysis was ranked in a newly-
formed group of diseases, all characterized by atrophy of these same
cells, and differing from each other principally in the acuteness of the
process and in its complications.110 Seguin, in his original lecture in 1874,
supported the same views, but in 1877 fully adopted that of myelitis. The
objections to this theory are: 1st, that by it two diseases so different in
their course, localization, electrical reactions, and form of paralysis as
atrophic paralysis and progressive muscular atrophy are essentially
identified on account of the identity of one lesion, the atrophy of the
anterior ganglionic cells;111 2d, the presence of other lesions or of traces
of them peremptorily proves the pre-existence of a complex morbid
process which involves the ganglionic cells, but is neither limited to them,
nor, necessarily, originates in them.
110 Thus, acute anterior poliomyelitis, subacute anterior poliomyelitis, progressive muscular
atrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, bulbar paralysis.

111 When this objection is accepted, Barlow's remark falls to the ground, that “the similarity
of lesion found in two such different diseases as infantile paralysis and progressive muscular
atrophy proves the failure of anatomical characters, taken alone, to serve as a basis of
nosology” (Brain, April, 1879, p. 74).

This inference was drawn by Roger from the hemorrhagic softening,

dilatation, and degeneration of blood-vessels, infiltrations with exudation-
corpuscles, and hyperplasia of conjunctive nuclei present in his case.
Similarily, Schultze, in a case examined nineteen years after the
occurrence of the paralysis, found traces of an extensive myelitis in the
diffusion of the lesions,112 in the exquisite cellular infiltration, the
proliferation of the neuroglia, and the atrophy of axis-cylinders of nerve-
fibres together with the cells; and inferred an anterior myelitis, diffused in
the long axis of the cord, but limited to the antero-posterior region.
Schultze defines Charcot's theory to be an hypothesis of such an acute
atrophy of ganglionic cells as leads to a rapid melting down of these
bodies, whereby reactionary inflammation is excited in the surrounding
tissue. This implies that the dying cells are able to act like a virulent
substance on the imbedding tissue, and of this, declares Schultze,
“Charcot has offered no proof.”113
112 In this case of paraplegia without lesion of the upper extremity, to which we have several
times alluded, there was bilateral atrophy of the lumbar cord, atrophy of the right anterior
nerve in the dorsal and lower cervical region, also in the cervical enlargement.

113 It might be said that the fall of the fever as soon as the paralysis is declared and the
motor cells presumably melted down should contradict the idea that their dying substance
acts as an irritant upon surrounding tissues.
A third objection has been brought forward by Leyden, and is really an
enlargement on the second. It is, that various lesions or morbid processes
may underlie the same clinical history. In four autopsies of cases
presenting all the clinical history of acute anterior poliomyelitis this author
has found three different lesions. In one an extensive lepto-meningitis,
together with irregular focal sclerosis of the white columns, evidently
depended upon the latter, and in turn caused sclerosis of the anterior
cornua with consequent destruction of their cells.114 In two other cases an
anterior poliomyelitis was accompanied by diffused lesions of the central
canal. Finally, in a fourth case the lesions were limited to the anterior
cornua, as is most usual.
114 This case of Leyden's throws light on the two autopsies by Laborde with sclerosis of the
white columns and intact cornua. It seems probable that a process originating in the cornua
had then been arrested or had receded, while continuing its evolution in the white columns.

The theory of acute atrophy of ganglionic cells is not sensibly different

from that of a parenchymatous myelitis.115 But all the objections which can
be urged against the former theory apply to the latter also, with the
exception that the hypothesis of inflammation suggests a cause for the
otherwise inexplicable atrophy. Observation of the pathological
appearances alone could not decide whether the irritation started in the
parenchymatous or interstitial tissues. Reference to the etiology of the
disease shows that of the two most frequent apparent causes, blood-
poisoning and traumatisms, the first would indicate that the inflammation
started in the connective tissue supporting the blood-vessels; the second
suggests that the irritation began in the spinal elements constituting the
origin of the nerves.
115 Hammond assumes such a form of myelitis in his classification of inflammations limited
to the anterior part of the gray matter of the spinal cord:

1. Inflammation of motor and trophic nerve-cells: (a) Infantile spinal paralysis; (b) Spinal
paralysis of adults; (c) Pseudo-hypertrophic spinal paralysis.

2. Inflammation of motor cells: (a) Glosso-labia-laryngeal paralysis.

3. Inflammation of trophic cells: (a) Progressive muscular atrophy; (b) Progressive facial
atrophy (Dis. Nerv. Syst., 6th ed., p. 464).

We think this classification open to several fundamental criticisms.

Whatever be the starting-point, however, it is very evident that the morbid
process soon involves all the tissues contained in the gray matter of the
anterior horns, and constitutes, therefore, a real anterior poliomyelitis.

A question of much interest is the relation to this of the lesions of the

anterior roots and of the white columns. Is the atrophy of nerve-tubes a
passive consequence of their separation from the ganglionic cells, the
sclerosis a secondary consequence of this? or is the sclerosis the cause
of the atrophy, itself the result of an irritation propagated downward from
the myelitic focus, according to the usual law for secondary
degenerations in motor tracts? or, finally, is it a residuum of a
leucomyelitis (or of the white substance), complicating by simple
extension the inflammation of the gray substance?

Review of the autopsies recorded would indicate that the lesions in

question are brought about sometimes in one, sometimes in another, of
these ways—sometimes even, as in Leyden's case, by extension from a
meningitis. That sclerosis of the white columns is most frequently a
secondary degeneration is indicated by the frequency with which it
appears below the lesion of the cornua, by the rarity with which it is found
above, and also by the general proportion between its intensity and that
of the disease of the gray matter.

We have devoted so much space to consideration of spinal-cord lesions,

because they are by far the most constant and the most important; after
these rank the structural alterations of the muscles, which received for a
while such a preponderance of attention.

Hammond has studied the progress of these changes on the living

subject by fragments of fibre successively removed with Duchenne's
harpoon. In an incipient stage of degeneration the fibrillæ are found to be
irregular and torn,116 the transverse striæ dim; oil-globules are seen
arranged according to the long axis of the fibre. In a more advanced
stage the transverse striæ nearly disappear, the oil-globules are in large
numbers, and fat-corpuscles are also abundant. Finally, the whole
specimen is seen as a mass of air-globules. Six weeks later, however,
these had in turn disappeared, and there remained a mass of connective
tissue.
 116 Though, from the method of removal, this appearance cannot be considered as certainly
pathological.

This series of changes, however, does not always take place, as

Hammond himself recognizes. Laborde117 first described a granular form
of muscle atrophy, where the muscular substance gradually wastes away
without ever becoming fatty, and leaving a transparent and hyaline
sheath. The two forms of fatty and of simple atrophy can be distinguished
by the naked eye. In the latter the muscle begins by being thinner or
lighter and softer than usual, ultimately turning light brown. The fatty
muscle becomes a homogeneous yellowish-white, diversified by
occasional remnants of reddish fibres.
117 Loc. cit., p. 131.

Proliferation of the interstitial connective tissue may be combined with

either simple or fatty atrophy. A combination of abundant sclerosis and
abundant fatty infiltration may lead to a pseudo-hypertrophy of the
muscles.

“There cannot be the slightest doubt,” observes Erb, “that the lesions
described constitute a degenerative atrophy similar to what may be
caused by section or sense traumatism of a peripheric nerve.”

The peripheric nerves have been much less thoroughly studied than the
spinal cord. Leyden first directed special attention to the nerves. He found
the sciatic altered in two cases,118 in the first by an interstitial neuritis; in
the second by partial atrophy. In 1880 the same writer, in an extensive
article on poliomyelitis and neuritis,119 greatly extends his views as earlier
expressed. Not only does he claim the coexistence of neuritis with spinal-
cord disease in atrophic paralysis, but thinks that many cases of this, and
also of other forms of paralysis, “lately supposed to originate in the spinal
cord, may really begin in any part of the motor apparatus,” thence
sometimes generalize throughout the whole apparatus, sometimes
remain limited to the original portion affected. Thus, progressive muscular
atrophy may sometimes begin in the nerves, sometimes in the muscles,
and sometimes in the ganglionic cells of the cord; and this variety of origin
explains the discrepancies of opinion which have been held upon the
nature of this disease. Similarly, all forms of acute or chronic atrophic
paralysis in either children or adults may begin in either the nerves or
cord, thence become generalized to both, or remain limited to one part of
the spinal motor system. Cases of atrophic paralysis which recover are
probably not cases of poliomyelitis at all, but of multiple neuritis,
rheumatic, traumatic, or infectious in nature. The regeneration of
peripheric nerves is a well-demonstrated possibility, but not that of the
cells of the cord. Lead-paralysis is usually confined to the nerves, but
sometimes extends to the cord. In diphtheritic paralysis Buhl has found
injection, thickening, and granular infiltration of nerves at the union of their
anterior and posterior roots;120 and as long ago as 1876, Dejerine, in a
case of atrophic paralysis in a syphilitic woman, found varicose swelling
of the medullary sheath in the nerves of the paralyzed lower extremities,
together with heaping up of the myeline into large drops, colored black in
glycerin and osmic-acid preparations. Coincidently, in the cord, at the
origin of the same nerves, the number of motor-cells was diminished, and
of those that remained the prolongations, and even the body, of the cell
were atrophied.121
118 Cases 34 and 35 of Table V., quoted from Arch. de Psychiatrie, Bd. vi., 1876.

119 Zeitschrift für Klin. Med., 1880.

120 Zeitschrift für Biol., 1867.

121 Arch. de Phys., 1876.

These views of Leyden's are extremely interesting, and should stimulate

future research into the condition of nerves in all cases of atrophic
paralysis. It is quite incorrect to say, as Archambault and Damaschino
have recently done,122 that Leyden denies the existence of anterior
poliomyelitis in such cases, especially in such as prove permanent. He
only insists on the frequent coincidence of neuritis, on a varying point of
departure for the morbid process, and on the probability that in cases of
recovery this process has always remained peripheric.
122 Le Union méd., 1883, 7, 35, case quoted in Table V. It is much to be regretted that
Damaschino, who strongly controverts Leyden's views, did not examine the nerves in his
own most interesting case.

The strongest objection to Leyden's theory is the absence in most

recorded cases, either infantile or adult, of the usual signs of nerve
inflammation, local pain, or tenderness. Autopsies of old cases are not
able to differentiate an inflammation from an atrophic process in the
nerves, followed by a secondary thickening of the endoneurium. This
thickening was found in three cases examined by Edmonds in 1882,
whose subjects had suffered from infantile paralysis in early life, and had
had the paralyzed limb amputated at the age of fifteen or sixteen.
Transverse sections were made from the internal popliteal nerves. The
specimens showed some healthy nerve-fibres, presumed to be sensory;
others much smaller, with the axis-cylinders wasted or degenerated; while
strands of connective tissue traversed the nerve-bundles, resulting from
hypertrophy of the endoneurium. The vessels showed inflammation of
their coats, with proliferation of the endothelium.123
123 Trans. Path. Soc. London, 1883.

The brain is usually normal, unless indeed the paralysis has affected
children previously rendered idiotic by congenital atrophia cerebri.
Sandie, however, examined one brain with an interesting positive
result.124 The brain was taken from a boy of fifteen paralyzed since the
age of three in almost all his muscles, with even paresis of the muscles of
the trunk and neck. The paralysis was more marked upon the right than
on the left side. At the autopsy, in addition to atrophy of the muscles and
of the motor nerves, with exquisite atrophy of the anterior columns and
anterior cornua, was found a decided atrophy of the left central
convolution, and, less marked, of the paracentral lobule. This was shown
by comparative measurements with the opposite side of the same brain,
and also with the corresponding convolution and lobule in two other
brains. The child's intelligence had not been affected.
124 Centralblatt f. d. Med. Wissensch., No. 15, 1875.

The arrest of development of the bones has been already mentioned, as

well as that of their epiphyses and apophyses. The compact osseous
tissue is atrophied: the medullary, on the contrary, abundantly developed
and rich in fat.

PATHOGENY OF INFANTILE PARALYSIS.—In the pathological anatomy of

infantile paralysis there are two principal facts to be correlated with its
clinical phenomena—namely, the limitation of the myelitis to the anterior
gray horns of the spinal cord; the destruction of the ganglionic nerve-cells
in these gray horns. That the other lesions observed are subordinate to
these is shown by their variableness as compared with the constancy of
the anterior poliomyelitis. These lesions are, in the cord, the atrophy and
sclerosis of the anterior nerve-roots and white columns; in the muscle, the
fatty degeneration or simple atrophy of the fibre; in the nerve, breaking
down, and finally atrophy of the myeline sheath, sometimes of the axis-
cylinder; proliferation of the endoneurium.

Consequence of Limitation of Myelitis.—Limitation of the morbid process

to a portion of the motor tract, the anterior cornua, and exclusion of the
posterior horns and roots, readily explain the predominant positive
symptom of motor paralysis, together with the absence of sensory
disturbance. The absence of muscular rigidity, spasm, active contraction,
and of exaggerated reflexes is similarly explained by the immunity from
the morbid process of the posterior white columns and the portion of the
lateral columns immediately adjacent to them. The motor paralysis
resulting from destruction of the anterior ganglionic cells of the cord is
much more complete than that which depends on simple interruption of
the motor tracts passing from the brain. The manner in which the motor
tracts are connected by a succession of arching fibres with these cells
already indicates that the latter are dépôts for the reinforcement of the
motor impulses. We must believe, indeed, that the centrifugal impulses
reaching the anterior cornua are not yet motor in character, but to become
so must sustain a new elaboration in the ganglionic cells of this region.
Evidently, the network of gray fibres connecting the arcuate strands of the
antero-lateral columns with the cells become, in virtue of that fact alone,
essential to the process. But it is also probable that the multiplied
transmission of impressions, which lies perhaps at the basis of the
process of their higher elaboration in ganglionic centres, is carried on in
the larger network of gray fibres as well as in the smaller network
contained in the ganglionic cells. Destruction of a portion of this network
would therefore interfere with the elaboration of the motor impulse, in the
same manner, though to a relatively less extent, as destruction of the
ganglionic cells themselves.

Trophic Lesions.—The rapid wasting of the paralyzed muscles, with their

degenerative electrical reactions, seems, however, to be an effect
altogether peculiar to lesions of the ganglionic bodies.125 According to
Charcot, who has so especially formulated the laws of amyotrophic
paralysis, all the ganglionic cells essential to the elaboration of motor
impulses exercise a trophic influence upon muscles. The spinal cell,
nerve-fibre, and muscle-fibre combine into a complex indissoluble unity or
element. One part of this lesion of complex elements is necessarily
followed by proportionate lesion of all its other parts.
125 The amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of Charcot exhibits in an exquisite manner the
difference between paralysis without atrophy, caused by sclerosis of the antero-lateral
columns, and paralysis with atrophy when the morbid process has extended to the anterior
cornua.

According to Erb, however, who extends Samuel's doctrine of special

trophic nerves, it is not the motor cells which influence the nutrition of the
muscle-fibres with which they are connected, but special trophic cells
lying among the others in the anterior cornua. This theory is principally
based on the existence of muscular atrophies of central origin
(progressive muscular atrophy, bulbar paralysis), unaccompanied for a
long time by paralysis.126 Hammond cites as a converse example the
anterior poliomyelitis “where the peripheric disturbance is, in the first
place, solely one of motility; this is paralysis without atrophy. After a time,
which may be as much as six months or even more, the trophic changes
begin.”127
126 Ziemssen's Handbuch.

127 Loc. cit., p. 429.

But surely this is an exaggerated emphasis on the exception, rather than

the true inference from the rule of rapid wasting in anterior poliomyelitis—
a rule so general as to have originated the title atrophic paralysis. Erb
gives an ingenious scheme (Fig. 55) of the mental relations of motor and
trophic cells with cerebral and spinal nerve-fibres. It will be seen that
isolated lesions of one or the other trophic apparatus might occur without
paralysis of motor tracts, while simultaneous lesion of the trophic
apparatus and of the ganglion-cells, or of the latter, involving the tracts
coming from the trophic cells, would cause, as in anterior poliomyelitis,
motor paralysis, muscular atrophy, loss of the reflexes, degenerative
reaction in nerves and muscles.

FIG. 55.
c, trophic cell for nerve; a, cerebral fibre; b, trophic cell for muscle; d,
ganglionic cell; s, sensory fibre; f, trophic path to muscle; m, muscle. (From
Ziemssen's Handbuch der Speciellen Pathol., Bd. xi. Zweite H., Zweite Abtheil,
p. 313.)
Duchenne and Joffroy128 also argue the existence of special trophic
nerve-cells. The absence129 of the nutritive lesions of the skin and cellular
tissue which are so conspicuous when the gray matter around the central
canal or posterior to it is involved,130 the dependence of the nutrition of the
motor apparatus, nerves, muscles, bones on the integrity of the anterior
horns, are facts which, taken together, seem to indicate that the
maintenance of nutrition depends on the unbroken continuity of the motor
or sensory apparatus from the periphery to the ultimate central element,
rather than on any special central cells endowed with trophic functions.131
Erb's hypothesis, as his own scheme moreover denotes, demands not
only trophic cells distinct from motor cells, but separate trophic cells for
the muscles, for the motor, and for the sensory nerves.
128 “De l'Atrophie aigue et chronique des Cellules nerveuses,” Arch. de Phys., No. 4, 1870.

129 Money, and also Gowers, have signalized a condition of the skin resembling myxœdema
(Tr. Path. Soc. London, 1884, and Brit. Med. Journ., 1879).

130 Mayer (Herman's Handbuch Physiol.) sums up the great mass of evidence now
accumulated, which demonstrates the trophic influence of the central gray mass of the cord
upon the tissue.

131 Nepveu (La France médicale, 1879) mentions some cases of infantile paralysis
complicated with trophic lesions of the skin. The facts, if accepted, could only indicate an
extension of the myelitis to the central and posterior regions of the gray columns. The
relations between non-atrophic paralysis caused by interruptions of the motor tracts and
muscular atrophy dependent on lesion of the anterior cornua are exquisitely shown in a case
reported by Sander. An adult suffered from chronic motor paralysis, gradually increasing, in
the right arm, with paresis of the lower extremities. In the hand, arm, and shoulder the
paralysis was followed by gradual atrophy and diminution of the faradic contractility; in the
lower extremities no atrophy occurred. At the autopsy was found a gliomatous tumor seated
in the anterior cornua predominating on the right side, extending from the level of the sixth
dorsal to that of the eighth cervical vertebra. The ganglion-cells were pigmented and
compressed, not altogether destroyed. The lumbar cord was intact, and the non-atrophic
paresis of the lower extremities evidently resulted from the interruption of the motor tract
above.

The peculiar grouping of nerve-centres within the cord that seems to be

indicated by some of the groupings of infantile paralysis shows, as has
been said, a probable divergence within the cord of nerve-fibres which
run together in the same nerve-stem. The associations to be expected
from the data of functional association and of clinical history are by no
means fully decided. It is even a matter of dispute whether the tibialis
anticus is functionally more associated with the flexors or with the
extensors of the thigh, and whether its experimental irritation or clinical
paralysis really coincides with that of the first or of the second group. This
entire field of observation is new and promises fertile results.132
132 It is from this field that has come a new argument for the spinal nature of lead-paralysis,
from its peculiar grouping, and from analogy with that of anterior poliomyelitis of the upper
extremities (Remak, “Ueber die Local. Atropa. Spinal Lahm.,” Archiv für Psych., Bd. ix.; also,
Ferrier, loc. cit.).

Relation between Limitation of Myelitis and Age.—From the relative

frequency of anterior poliomyelitis in childhood, as compared with its
much greater rarity in adult life, we must infer the existence of some
special conditions in childhood which tend to limit the morbid process to
such a portion of the cord. The theory of a primitive spontaneous atrophy
of the motor cells would serve, indeed, to explain this limitation. The
reasons already alleged for regarding the morbid process as a systematic
myelitis decisively hinder the acceptance of such an explanation as it
stands. On the assumption, however, that the myelitis is usually of
functional origin, and starts, therefore, in the elements of the anterior
cornua essentially involved in the motor functions, the morbid
susceptibility of these elements may be ranked with the liability to disease
of the entire locomotor system which is known to be so predominant in
children. From pathological evidence, even without anatomical proof, we
may reasonably infer an incompleteness of development in the anterior
cornua of the cord correlative with that well demonstrated in the bones
and functionally inexperienced muscles. If the antero-posterior fibres
which connect the anterior cornua with the central and posterior gray
masses be also incomplete, the radiation of irritations, and consequent
vascular irritation, would also be arrested within the boundaries of the
original lesion. Thus a peculiarly circumscribed, instead of the common
diffused, myelitis of adults.

Money133 points out that for the gray matter of the cord, as of the brain,
the centre or maximum force of the circulation is on the periphery, and the
nutritive supply of the centre is thus easily cut off. Moreover, while the
blood-vessels of the cervical and dorsal regions of the cord pass to it