ABSTRACT
During the early decades of the 20th century, physiological studies of the brains of lower vertebrates were scarce compared with the deluge of research by neuroanatomists, whose interest in the functional significance of the structures they so meticulously described was based largely on inference. There were, of course, some notable exceptions. William Loeser (1905) at the University of Kansas repeated on the frog the 19th-century decortication studies in higher animals of Goltz (1881). The later work of Johnston, Rogers, Bagley, and others on the effects of cortical stimulation and decerebration in mammals, amphibians, and birds has been mentioned. A review (Aronson & Noble, 1945) of those investigations, however, pointed out that there is no cerebral cortex in the avian brain, and claims of an excitable motor pallium in reptiles probably rested on a spread of current to the subcortical striatum. Although most of the results of stimulating the more developed mammalian cortex did little more than confirm and extend the 19th-century observations of Eduard Hitzig and David Ferrier, the intensity and scope of the work accomplished in the general field of physiology, the publication of experimental details, and the luster of the sophisticated laboratory settings had created a strong European attraction. It was inevitable, then, that the major American figures should seek to strengthen their knowledge of nervous system function from that source and initiate a steady intercontinental exchange which continues today.
