volving the intellectual faculties, and even the emotions, as well as the simple functions of the senses.

carriage, or yet more in any situation physical relations they disclose to us; inwhere, from necessity or decorum, a struggle has to be made against sleep, we obtain an easy estimate, sufficient to show how rapid are the fluctuations which thus Somnambulism, though we may class it affect the most important organ of our among the anomalous aspects of sleep, is frame. A sudden drop of the head awak- probably not more than an exaggerated ens to a consciousness, which is often form of phenomena of ordinary occurrence. lost again in a few seconds of time; The retention of a certain voluntary power, and such alternations, as is well known, while the senses are more or less wrapt up are repeated over and over again. Any- in slumber, and this unequal slumber of the one who has passed a dozen or twenty senses themselves, are well known to us hours on horseback (we speak from fre- in the common case of talking in sleep, quent experience) must well recollect the and other bodily motions associated with effects of this hurried repetition - the dreams. Somnambulism is doubtless alloss of balance from momentary slumber, ways thus associated. Why in certain the sudden awaking in the effort to re- persons this connexion is so strikingly trieve it, and the distressing efforts to attested it would be hard to say; but still prevent relapse into sleep. Without pre- it is only a gradation of state, and not a tending to exactness in a matter thus detached phenomenon. We may further vague and fluctuating even in the terms presume (and many incidents related conapplied, we venture to say on observation | firm this view), that somnambulism chiefly that three or four distinct alternations of occurs during the time when the cerebral sleep and waking— that is, of conscious-functions are already partially awakeness lost and restored - may and do occur within a single minute of time. Strange and sudden as these changes in our sensorial existence may seem to be, they are yet compatible with that continuity by gradation, already indicated as the sole method of rightly interpreting the phenomena.

Connected with this subject is the curious chronometry so often impressed upon sleep, testified by the power of awaking invariably at some one determinate hour. The explanation of this fact must be sought for in what may be called the general chronometry of life; in the tendency, more or less, of all vital functions to assume a periodical character, either from original constitution, or from engendered habits acquiring the force and persistency of natural functions. This topic has hardly yet received all the attention it deserves as a branch of animal physiology. It might merit a treatise in itself.

We have hitherto been speaking chiefly of what may be considered as the natural forms of sleep. But there are many anomalous aspects of this great function which we are equally bound to notice some of them depending on casual and not always obvious causes- others on artificial means used to produce sleep or those states akin to it in which there is a suspended action, more or less, of the senses connecting us with the outer world. Some of these states, which may well be called waking dreams, are of deep interest in the mental and moral, as well as

another expression of the fact upon which we have so much dwelt, that sleep is a series of states ever fluctuating in kind and degree. We may accredit the statement that the passing dreams of those so affected are rarely remembered; and yet reconcile this with the view we have just taken of the phenomenon. The startling aspect of somnambulism, and the rarity of its occurrence, have given a mysterious colouring to this condition of sleep, and even made it a theme for dramatic representation, for poetry, and music. Like all other things unfamiliar to us, it is doubtless the subject of much exaggeration in particular instances. But enough remains to render it a striking exponent of these complex relations of the sensorial and other functions, in which so many of the mysteries of life have their source.

In following the history of sleep and dreams we are perpetually passing from one marvel or mystery to another. It may seem, perhaps, that these terms do not apply to the familiar effect of opiates and other soporifics in producing sleep. But it is this familiarity which conceals from us the wonder of the fact, that a mere grain or two swallowed of a particular vegetable extract should have the power for a time of bringing the whole mental and bodily mechanism under its control; or that a still more minute quantity of opium or morphia, inserted under the skin, should speedily subdue the most acute neuralgic pain. A physical cause must be concerned in all this, but no known physical law can be brought to its

explanation. The only scope for speculation here is that afforded by reference to other facts more or less alike in kind. The whole class of poisons, as they are termed, may be quoted as instances of such analogy; some of these bodies Strychnia, Woorara, the Upas-poison, &c. -furnishing curious examples of what may be called selective power in their action on the respective organs and functions of the body. The animal poisons, again, those which give material to contagious diseases, come under the same category. In all these cases there lies the great mystery of vital organs seized upon, and life itself often extinguished, by quantities incredibly small of substances, the elements of which, combined in other proportions, are perfectly innocuous in effect. We may seek to explain these things upon the the theory of fermentation, and the doctrines of atomic and molecular affinities, but never do we get further than to possibilities, incomprehensible to our reason.

Within the same fiield of inquiry come those anesthetic agents of artificial creation - Ether, Chloroform, the Nitrous Oxide, &c.—which, while inducing a state of stupor more or less profound, do at the same time so wonderfully annul the sensibility to pain. The records of modern surgery copiously illustrate the practical value of this great discovery, which under its theoretical aspect is closely associated with the nature and phenomena of sleep. It affords another example of the manner in which these various states of the sensorium graduate into one another throughout.

of dreams in their relations to sleep, may perhaps afford the best interpretation of many of these strange phenomena.

As regards the most notable of them Mesmeric sleep so much has been written and argued to and fro, and the simple question as it first stood been turned into so many collateral channels, that we shall not seek to go beyond what is essential to our subject. Is there, we may ask, any such special form or mode of sleep as that denoted under this name-produced by a certain subtle influence, emanating from one person, and affecting, even without actual contact, the body of another? We may say at once that neither in the sleep so produced, nor in the collateral effects assigned to it, do we find anything that has not kindred with the natural phenomena of sleep and dreams, and which is not explicable by the anomalous forms these so often assume without any external influences. As regards the simple effect in question, we believe we might as well speak of sermon sleep, of rocking-cradle sleep, of the sleep of an easy arm-chair, or of a dull book, as of Mesmeric sleep. The experiments of Mr. Braid, embodied under the name of Hypnotism, show the effects even of posture or fixed direction of vision in bringing on this state. So multiplied and various, indeed, are the conditions, bodily and mental, tending to it, that the marvel of being awake is almost as great as that of sleep, produced by the manipulations and other appliances which the mesmerizer brings to his aid. Among these appliances we must especially reckon the age, sex, and personal temperament of those who are usually the subjects of these exhibitions. Anyone who cares to examine the records of them will see how important is the part these conditions play in the drama of mesmerism.

We have yet to speak here of certain other phenomena, in which sleep or states akin to it, assume still more anomalous and startling forms. We allude to those conditions of the sensorium, occurring in persons of a peculiar temperament, and Granted that the facts are strange and often associated with bodily or mental difficult of explanation. But so, and from disorder, which are known under the the same causes, are all the ordinary names of trance, catalepsy, mesmeric sleep, phenomena of sleep and dreams. Their &c.— names almost as vague as the aber- familiarity disguises what is equally wonrations they denote. These several states, derful in them. It is well worthy of note and even the more familiar incidents of in this, as in many other questions of the reverie and absence of mind, have all a kind, how much subordinate objects usurp certain community of character, the differ- the place of those of higher import. In ences being chiefly of degree, or due to the so-called mesmeric phenomena, as the immediate causes producing them. proffered to our belief, the mesmerizer They all furnish examples of that dissev-plays a far more important part than the erment, so to express it, of the sensorial person acted upon. The facts presented functions, which leaves a portion of them pass into utter insignificance, unless it awake while others lie in a state of slum-can be shown that they depend upon ber more or less profound. What we some direct emanation of power from the have said and shall further have to say, former. Prove that such influence ac

It

tually issues from one living being, thus | example of the incongruities which are changing the condition of another in its found even in minds of the highest genius proximity, and we have a new and won- and culture. Human life abounds in such derful element, material or spiritual, instances. brought at once into the arena of life. is admitted, indeed, that this mysterious power is possessed by few individuals only a limitation, if the facts be real, almost as strange as the power itself. But we may at once state our belief that no such peculiar power exists. The operator himself cannot furnish evidence of it. The effects he produces by his manipulations and other devices are closely analogous, often identical, with those to which individuals of a certain nervous temperament are liable from other and very different exciting causes. This, then, we apprehend to be the crucial question in all that appertains to mesmeric sleep, under its various aspects. The simple fact of sleep thus produced was known long ago; but it was reserved for our time to erect it into a mysterious principle, altering, were it real, all our views of mental phenomena.

But that it would be straying too far from our subject, we might speak here of certain bolder impositions upon human credulity which have gained a recent notoriety. Connected in some points with mesmeric effects, and often admitting of similar interpretation, they go far beyond these in their pretensions; bringing us into contact and communication with the world of deceased spirits, through the intervention of persons mediums as they are called gifted with the power of thus summoning spirits from the dead. We put this in the simplest terms, because the mere enunciation of it may well annul the gross pretension it involves. And when examining further into the methods employed to exhibit and attest these spiritual appearances - the puerile and pantomimic devices of spirit-rappping, table-turning, &c., and the vulgar and ignorant talk which these revenans are made to utter, we may be content to leave such things to their own eventual refutation. Argument is of little avail with those who can lend a facile faith to these fantastic performances, rendered more suspicious by a mercenary ingredient often mixed with them. The contrivances employed we cannot always explain. But exactly the same may be said of the performances of the fair-dealing professional conjurer, who puzzles and tells you that he means to do so. That some very intelligent men should have given partial credit to these illusions, is but another

We have thus far been speaking of Sleep in its more general characters, natural or anomalous; connecting it, indeed, with that wonderful adjunct of Dreaming, from which it can hardly be separated. But some distinct consideration must be given to the latter to those fleeting shadows, the punuara (was, which so strangely divide, yet link together, the successive portions of our lives. In writing on this subject, the plural personality of an anonymous reviewer becomes somewhat inconveient. If we have to speak of our experience, it must be understood only in an individual sense. Here, indeed, we may fairly ask our readers to become critics also; for each and all have some experimental knowledge of their own, wherewith to confirm or contradict what is set before them. But this knowledge, from causes already assigned, is generally vague and transient. The memory of the dream is speedily discarded by the waking events that follow, and dreams are often so intermingled in the same night that no effort of recollection can disentangle them. We doubt if any one has ever attempted a successive written record of these erratic visions of our sleeping hours. If carefully and honestly executed, it would be more curious and valuable than many of those diaries of ordinary events which amuse the leisure, or innocently please the little vanities, of those who keep them. A certain number of records of dreams, coming from authentic sources, and indicating especially their relations to acts or events immediately or remotely antecedent, might justify conclusions attainable in no other way a shadowy science, it may be admitted, yet better than none.

We have used the term honestly here, because from causes already assigned, there is much proneness to exaggeration, as well as great facility for it, in the relation of dreams. To give completeness to a vague story is a temptation to the narrator, and it may be indulged without fear of contradiction. This temptation becames stronger where a certain superstitious feeling creeps in, suggested, as we have elsewhere remarked, by some one of the many strange coincidences of events which, casual though they be, take strong hold of the imagination. We might vivify our subject by half-a-dozen

stories of such dreams; some of them of | void of dreaming? The vague and brokold date, but keeping their vitality as an- en memories of dreams teli us nothing ecdotes by the seeming mystery they in- certain as to their time or duration, and volve. It is needless to say that these without this aid we are helpless as to any stories lose nothing of their marvellous sure result. But, though failing in this character by long repetition. The origi- particular case, the memory is the faculnal dreamers, we believe, would often be ty on which we must mainly depend for perplexed by the shapes their dreams our knowledge of them, and of the enighave gradually assumed, with positive af- mas they present. Aristotle as already firmation at each step of the story. A noticed, puts the question pertinently, simple question will often disturb narra-"Why do we remember some dreams, tives of this kind. We recollect an in- others not ?"-implying, of course, what stance where the mystery related was a we know by observation, that the state dream by an officer in America of the of dreaming exists even when there is no death of a friend in India, whose death after recollection to attest it. The queswas stated to have occurred at the very tion admits of being plausibly answered. hour of the dream. A dry sceptic at the The best-remembered dream is that table blighted the anecdote by asking, if which immediately antecedes the modue allowance had been made for the ment of waking, when the functions susdifference of longitude of the two coun-pended by sleep have partially regained tries? So few of these harmless superstitions are left to us, that the interruption to the story might have been charitably spared.

their power. The dream itself, indeed, especially if sensational in kind, is often the direct cause of the change of state; and such dreams may occur repeatedly in the same night, each leaving its own impress on the brain. Whether there be any absolute blank in this complex series of change is the question yet unsolved. Bearing on this point is the fact, that dreams, forgotten in the morning, are sometimes suddenly recalled by later incidents of the day. A clue once got through some casual association, the recollection often retraces these past visons of the night, which, but for such casualty, would never have been revived.

We have already said much of the marvel of dreams, as a portion of life alternating with the higher functions of the waking state. Contrasting the two states, it could hardly be supposed that one should be the best expounder of the other. Yet such is in reality the case. Dreams, even in their strangest incongruities, are in no way so well interpreted as through the acts of the mind awake. The law of continuity is preserved here also, though often and variously infringed upon by those complex and intermingling rela- We must not, however, speak of their tions of body and mind to which, whether annihilation. Dreams leave traces on the awake or asleep, we are unceasingly sub- brain, the same kind, though perhaps less jected. As we feel and recollect them in forcibly marked, than those impressed by ourselves, and note them in others, the sensations, emotions, and volitions dreams go through every grade of inten- of the waking state. We may plausibly sity and reality; and this, probably, in a from this source seek explanation of those certain inverse ratio to the soundness of vague shadows of past events which now the sleep. We are using here terms of and then come across the mind, perplexvague acceptation thus applied, but we ing it with a sort of semi-reality, but not possess no true vocabulary for the func-attested by any collateral recollection. tions in question. What we may affirm is, that sleep in its purely physical part, and dreams in their aberrant intellectual phenomena, are ever acting upon each other, and in every degree of activity; such mutual influence being especially testified in the acts of going to sleep and awakening from it. It is the same mysterious union which pervades and gives continuity to life, and which has excited and baffled curiosity in every age of the world.

We have already discussed the question which here naturally recurs, whether there is any condition of sleep utterly de

Most of our readers have probably experienced this curious wandering of the mind amidst what we believe to be the shades of old dateless dreams, called suddenly into life, and as suddenly flitting away. If this be, as we suppose, an act of Memory reviving ancient dreams, it is but one of the endless wonders of this great faculty of our nature, the study of which, under its many anomalies in health and disease, in its sleeping as well as waking moods carries us further into the mystery of the mind itself than we can reach by any other approach. That there is a certain material mechanism of mem

ory, an organization upon which impres- | these series, the Will is that most imsions are made and retained, the facts com- portant- often indeed a slave to vagrant pel us to believe. Whether we shall ever habits of thought, but capable of becomacquire a more intimate knowledge of its ing their master. The highest faculty of nature is very doubtful. The minute anat- man, intellectual and moral, lies in the omy of the human brain and its append- power of controlling and guiding them in ages, while disclosing much that is curious their passage through the mind; so diin structure and in relation to the senses recting them as to ennoble the character and vital organs, has failed to detect any of thought itself, and the acts derived apparatus of memory, or those conditions from it." which make recollection an act of the human will.

Without pursuing this subject further, instructive though it be as a method of Ignorant here, we are still able to af- mental analysis, we proceed to another firm that the memory and the recollec- chapter in the History of Dreams, emtion (μvýun, ávúuvnois; the faculty and the bodied in the question, What are the maact) are strictly analogous in their appli- terials of these visions of our sleep? Of cation to the visions of the night as to what "stuff are dreams made?" The first the events of the day. In each case the and natural comment upon the question recollection works its backward way is, that dreams, like waking thoughts, must through the successive antecedent states be different in different minds, and with of the sensorium; guided by the same some explicit reference to their individuassociations, and stopt by the same im-ality. Such is doubtless the case, and pediments. Anyone caring to examine among classes of men as well as individhis own consciousness on the subject will see how similar the process is in kind, though, as regards the dream, rendered more partial and perplexing by the other conditions of sleep.

uals. We have already alluded to this curious inquiry, one admitting of the strongest presumption, if not of direct proof. Passing by the dreams of infant life, as inaccessible to observation, can we suppose But we may carry this analogy on to those of the idle schoolboy to be moulded another point. Many anecdotes are fa- like the dreams of a man immersed in miliar to us, and these sanctioned by in- worldly care and anxieties? or like those dividual observation, showing how much of old age wandering vaguely over the and what variety of thought, emotion, and memories and feelings of past life? How event may be comprised in a dream of are we to compare the dreams of the daythe briefest duration. The chronology of labourer in the field, the factory, or the the night is generally an obscure one; mine, with those of men whose faculties but this particular fact is easily tested, have been exercised and exalted by literaespecially in the broken dreams of the ture, science, and the arts; or by the politimorning hours. It proves that the period cal struggles which enter into the governof a few minutes may include a whole ment of the world? The sleeping minds story of incidents, in which the percep- of Bacon and Newton, of Dante, Shaketions of place, time, and persons are re-speare, and Milton, of Michael Angelo and moved from the outer world into those of the little world within. This may seem strange to the unobservant of themselves, but it will not so seem to any who are capable of examining with care the sequence of their waking thoughts. We live, the mind lives, in a constant series or succession of states, each one having its own individuality and excluding others, yet linked together by a mechanism which we vainly seek to interpret. No one without close examination can conceive the multitude of these sequent states which may be, and actually are, crowded into short spaces of time ever liable, indeed, to be interrupted by causes from without and within, and merging into new series, which in their continuous succession form the totality of our mental life. Of the internal causes acting on

Raphael, of Julius Cæsar and Napoleon, must have been tenanted with visions very different from those of ordinary men. Who, again, can tell us what are the dreams of madness in its many forms, some of these forms having close kindred physiologically with the act of dreaming? The dreams of the idiot may resemble those of early childhood, or the second childhood of old age. What shall we conjecture as to those of the man who has undergone years of solitary confinement, changeless in sensations and events? Such questions might be variously multiplied. They tell us how much we have to learn, and the difficulty of learning it. Hardly can we reduce into shape the fleeting memories of our own dreams. Harder still is it to authenticate those of others, especially of classes of mankind little prone to take