But the Peckhams' careful observations and experiments show that, with the American wasps, the victims stored in the nests are quite as often dead as alive; that those which are only paralysed live for a varying number of days, some more, some less; that wasp larvae thrive just as well on dead victims, sometimes dried up, sometimes undergoing decomposition, as on living and paralysed prey; that the nerve-centres are not stung with the supposed uniformity; and that in some cases paralysis, in others death, follows when the victims are stung in parts far removed from any nerve-centre.
Each nerve-centre controls its own antimere or segment of the body, receiving sensory impressions from the tentaculocyst and innervating its special subdivision of the muscular system.
The epithelium of the outer surface was probably ciliated, and a portion of it in the preoral lobe differentiated as a sense-organ, with longer cilia and underlying nerve-centre, from which two nerves ran back below the ventral surface.
These last structures formed a nervous sheath around the axial sinus with its bloodvessels, and became divided into five lobes correlated with the five basals (the "chambered organ") and forming the aboral nerve-centre.
In 1791 France was pulverized into innumerable administrative atoms incapable of cohesion; and the result was that Paris became more than ever the brain and nerve-centre of France.