Quoted by Micheal Finn, 'The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the making of the modern brain sciences in the nineteenth century', University of Leeds PhD thesis (2012).
Description:

'As Ferrier wrote a short while after his investigations at the asylum, with electrical stimulation:

[we] can begin at the outworks, at the organs of sense and motion, with which the nervous system communicates; we can study their operations during life, we can experimentally vary their circumstances; we can find how they act upon the brain and how the brain reacts upon them.'

' (140-141)

'C.S. Sherrington commented that after 1873, '[t]he next decade saw a flowing tide of research setting toward localisation... A localisation vogue reigned for nearly a quarter of a century, and became in due course tedious and relatively infertile. But the importance of the work which ushered it in cannot be forgotten.' Whilst his comment that localisation experiments became 'tedious' is a subjective one, indicating a later outlook, it also reflects just how copied Ferrier's methods were.' (142)