In the year 1906, Pierre Marie,1 in a series of articles appearing in the Semaine médicale, began a critical revision of the existing conceptions of aphasic syndromes. The status of the problem in 1906, as well as the revision proposed by Pierre Marie, may be found developed in detail in the thesis of Moutier.2
I do not wish to attempt an evaluation of Marie's conception of aphasia which has been done long ago by Adolf Meyer3 and others, but merely to show of what service it may be to the neurosurgeon. For this purpose it will suffice to recall briefly that for Pierre Marie the ordinary aphasia, or aphasia of Broca, is not a clinical entity but a syndrome, the juxtaposition of two distinct troubles, anarthria and aphasia. "Anarthria" is the term he employs to denote the difficulty or impossibility of articulating words in the absence of