This essay followed closely on the heels of its predecessor, moving from the concerns of "diseased imagination" to those of the neuroanatomy of skin when viewed in the context of race. I was bewildered by the connections in Enlightenment scientific thought, especially in the light of its developing anthropology. Besides, presentist concerns in the early 1970s drove me there at a moment when you could still use the word "Negro" in America without being called a racist, yet — paradoxically — it was acutely evident that something was profoundly troubled in our race relations. I found one clue in the writings of the obscure French physician Nicolas Le Cat who had won a prize for his radical beliefs about the consequences for race of nervous mechanistic physiology. Note 1 below provides a brief summary of his work. But Le Cat was also representative of the growing Continental attraction to the concept of a thoroughly "nervous body" and became wholly invested in it. His writings, soon known in cities from Edinburgh to Copenhagen and St Petersburg, extended the already large domain of the nerves.