pumpkinstrokemarrow

She also included a diagram of an ear, which on reflection I found rather perturbing. There being, in turns out, a hole through the skull behind each ear, holes through which pass the hearing nerves. I had rather thought, without thinking as it were, that all the wiring into the skull went in through the bottom, safe and out of the way. Taxed FIL on the matter and he explained, with the aid of his trusty 'Nurses' Illustrated Physiology' (E & S Livingston Ltd, 1964), that there are 12 cranial nerves that do this, attending to important things like seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting. Motor control of the head and of the heart. He was also able to remember a training ditty, including various naughty words, used to commit the rather complicated names of said 12 nerves to memory. We taxed him further on the appropriateness of naughty words in an environment containing lots of nice young women and he defended himself by explaining that, generally speaking, it was the nice young women who taught one the ditties.

Pursued the matter through the advertising breaks that evening with Dr. A. S. Romer on vertebrates, partly in order to find out what a dorsal horn was, a term I come across occasionally and had not hitherto bothered to track down. Where I find that I having been suffering from a major misunderstanding about spinal cords. I had thought that the spinal cord ran down the middle of the vertebral column, again, safe and out of the way. Romer explains that actually it runs down the dorsal surface of the vertebral column proper, encased by add-ons called neural arches. What might run down the middle of the vertebral column is something called the notocord, a first attempt at a spinal cord by the dinosaurs (or maybe before then), more or less absent in modern vertebrates. Never too late to learn.

I also find out what a dorsal horn is; the only catch being that there seem to be lots of them rather than just one. Still working on that.

PS: not impressed to read in yesterday's DT that the epidemic of second war memorials has not yet died down. It is proposed to spend around £5m on a memorial near Green Park to those who gave their lives while serving in Bomber Command. 50,000 or so of them I think. I had thought the day for this sort of thing was done; particularly as many have reservations about what Bomber Command got up to towards the end of the war. All of which prompts me to wonder what sort of memorial those who gave their lives while serving in U-boat command got? About 50,000 or so them too, I think. Mr Google gives the answer in one: http://www.ubootehrenmal.de.