Sir,

I read Dr. Barlow's article, in your issue of July 1, with the greatest interest. I should like to draw your readers' attention to two passages in his account of the action:

"Prof. Samson Wright dealt carefully with this point and established that what Alexander was referring to as his 'primary control' has nothing whatever to do with Magnus's concept of the Zentralapparat which refers to centres in the brain stem."

"Summing up on this point, the Appeal Judges said: ' . . . The expert witnesses called for the defence say that Alexander's knowledge of these subjects is very limited and some of them suggest that he never read any description of Magnus's experiments but was given a second-hand account of them which he did not understand.'"

I have had an intimate association with Mr. Alexander for close on twenty-two years and have been with him when he was reading the account of Magnus's experiments, as described in The Lancet over twenty years ago, and when he was reading the account given in the Lane lectures. Further, I was at least one person who gave him "a second-hand account, of them" inasmuch as I provided him with a translation from the original German in which Magnus wrote his book Körperstellung, and gave him what I considered to be the meaning of passages on p. 619. I understood these passages as the anatomical foundations a central integrating apparatus, its manner of operation, and its place of operation in the operation of the cerebro-spinal, sensory motor, and muscular mechanisms of the animal as a whole within the range of animals on which Magnus had experimented.

I can claim no expert standing as a German scholar and may have been responsible for laying Mr. Alexander open to a charge that he relied upon a person who was not competent to guide him. May I suggest that a reliable translation of these passages should now be made in order that their meaning in English may cease to be a matter of dispute?

My reasons for this suggestion are that F. Matthias Alexander, the late Rudolph Magnus, and the late G. E. Coghill, all working quite independently, all working experimentally, and, by the nature of their origins and education, working largely without pre-conceptions about the subject with which they worked, came to the conclusion that they could demonstrate what they variously called a "primary," "central," or "primordial and indigenous" integrating guidance and direction of the living "psycho-physical" or "psycho-organismal" whole. In his work with living persons, Alexander has transcended the work of Magnus and Coghill by providing a technique whereby a person may make use of primary control and may thus guide and control the manner of the performance of his reactions in the best possible way.

Alexander may appear to stand making quite alone in his experiments in drawing his conclusions from these experiments; but it is possible, as I contend, that he would not be quite alone were the words written by Magnus about Zentralapparat translated without prejudice.