true.” "And my baby, my baby! I don't care for myself much! but my baby!" Apparently you have studied the sub-piteous face. "I am afraid it is only too ject very closely closer, I doubt not, than I have," replied Mr. Rivers, in that hard voice of his. Hannah thought it at the time almost cruel; "therefore there is the less need for me to give you any opinion, which I am very reluctant to do." "Mrs. Dixon is a Dissenter, many of whom, I believe, think as she does on this matter, but we Church people can only hold to the Prayer-book and the law. Both forbid such marriages as yours. You being brother and sister "If you ask me to tell you the truth, I must tell it. I refused to marry James Dixon because I knew it would be no marriage at all, and could only be effected by deceiving the clergyman, as I suppose was done. Therefore you are not his wife, and your baby is, of course, an illegitimate child." Grace gave a shrill scream that might have been heard through the house. Lest it should be heard, or from some other in"But we weren't, sir; not even cousins.stinct which she did not reason upon, Miss Indeed, I never set eyes on Jim till just Thelluson jumped up, and shut and bolted before Jane died." the door. When she turned back the poor girl lay on the floor in a dead faint. "You being brother and sister,” irritably repeated Mr. Rivers," or the law making you such "But how could it make us when we were not born so?" pleaded poor Grace with a passionate simplicity. "You being brother and sister," Mr. Rivers said for the third time, and now with actual sternness, "you could not possibly be married. Or if you were married, as you say, it was wholly against the law. James Dixon has taken advantage of this, as I have heard of other men doing; but I did not believe it of him." Grace turned whiter and whiter. "Then what he says is really true? I am not his wife?" Hannah took her up in her arms. "Please help me!" she said to Mr. Rivers, not looking at him. "I think the servants are all gone to bed. I hope they are, it will be much better. Once get her up-stairs and I can look after her myself." "Can you? Will it not harm you?" "Oh, no!" and Hannah looked pitifully on the stony face that lay on her lap. "It has been very hard for her. Poor thing! poor thing!" Mr. Rivers said nothing, but silently obeyed his sister-in-law's orders, and between them they carried Grace up to Miss Thelluson's room. Almost immediately afterwards she heard him close the door of "I can't help you; I wish I could," said his own, and saw no more of him, or any Mr. Rivers, at last looking down upon the 'one, except her charge, till morning. PAPER. From the English Mechanic we | mete, a kind of large rush, 8 or 10 ft. in height, learn that Africa appears to be capable of sup- of which large quantities can be obtained, and plying the wants of all our paper-makers; as which in all probability will be found of use in besides the esparto grass and the bark of the the fabrication of ropes and paper. Adansonia, there is a fibre-producing plant called diss-grass, which, though difficult to work and not so valuable as the better-known esparto, can yet be obtained in such quantities and at such a price as will render it a useful THERE are few more zealous cultivators of luxury. The dwarf palm can be obtained in Astronomy than an Indian gentleman, Mr. almost any quantity in Algeria, but the cost of Nursing Row, a friend of the late Admiral collection is rather more than that of esparto, Manners, who has built an observatory at his as each leaf is picked separately, and its manu- own expense at Vezagapatam. Although he has facture into paper is more difficult and expen- recently suffered a heavy loss of property from sive, the texture of the fibre varying in different a cyclone sweeping over his estate, Mr. Nursing parts of the leaf, one portion of which contains Row sent the munificent donations of 1007. some yellowish wax or resin, extremely difficult to the Mansion House Fuud for the relief of the to kill, and almost impossible to detect till it is distress in Paris, and 1007. to the fund for supdiscovered on the hot rollers and the paper is plying seed and other aid to the French peasspoilt. The rivers of South Africa are in many antry. He is also a most generous benefactor to places choked with a plant known as the pal-' the poor in his own neighbourhood. Nature. From Macmillan's Magazine. DREAMS AS ILLUSTRATIONS OF UNCON SCIOUS CEREBRATION. BY FRANCES POWER COBBE. In a paper published in this Magazine in November 1870,* I endeavoured to range together a considerable number of facts illustrative of the automatic action of the brain. My purpose in the present article is to treat more at length one class of such phenomena to which I could not afford space proportionate to their interest, in the wide survey.required by the design of the former article. I shall seek to obtain from some familiar and some more rare examples of dreams such light as they may be calculated to throw on the nature of brainwork, unregulated by the will. Perhaps I may be allowed to add, as an apology for once more venturing into this field of inquiry, that the large number of letters and friendly criticisms which my first paper called forth have both encouraged me to pursue the subject by showing how much interest is felt in its popular treatment, and hence also afforded me the advantage of the experience of many other minds regarding some of the obscure mental phenomena in question. In the present case I shall feel grateful to any reader who will correct from personal knowledge any statement I may have used which he finds erroneous. Dr. Carpenter, I am permitted to state, purposes shortly to republish, with additional matter, the sections of the eleventh chapter of his "Human Physiology," withdrawn from the later editions of that work, which treat of the action of the cerebral organs and their relation to the operations of the mind. In this work the physiological theory of unconscious cerebration will be explained at length, with ample illustrations. But the reason why from among the five thousand thoughts of the day, we revert at night especially to thoughts number 2, 3, 4, 5, instead of to thoughts number 2, 3, 4, 6, or any other in the list, is obviously impossible to conjecture. We can but observe that the echo of the one note has been caught, and of the others lost amid the obscure caverns of the memory. Certain broad rules, however, may be remarked as obtaining generally as regards the topics of dreams. In the first place, if we have any present considerable physical sensation or pain, such as may be produced by a wound, or a fit of indigestion, or hunger, or an unaccustomed sound, we are pretty sure to dream of it in preference to any subject of mental interest only. Again, if we have merely a slight sensation of uneasiness, insufficient to cause a dream, it will yet be enough to colour a dream otherwise suggested with a disagreeable hue. Failing to have a dream suggested to it by present physical sensation, the brain seems to revert to the subjects of thought of the previous day, or of some former period of life, and to take up one or other of them as a theme on which to play variations. As before remarked, the grounds of choice among all such subjects cannot be ascertained, but the predilection of Morpheus for those which we have not in our waking hours thought most interesting, is very noticeable. Very rarely indeed do our dreams take up the matter which has most engrossed us for hours before we sleep. A wholesome law of variety comes into play, and the brain seems to decide, "I have had enough of politics, or Greek, or fox-hunting, for this time. I will amuse myself quite differently." Very often, perhaps we may say generally, it pounces on some transient thought which has flown like a swallow across it by dayDreams are to our waking thoughts light, and insists on holding it fast through much like echoes to music; but their re- the night. Only when our attention to verberations are so partial, so varied, so any subject has more or less transgressed complex, that it is almost in vain we seek the bounds of health, and we have been among the notes of consciousness for the morbidly excited about it, does the main echoes of the dream. If we could by any topic of the day recur to us in dreaming means ascertain on what principle our at night; and that it should do so, ought, dreams for a given night are arranged, and I imagine, always to serve as a warning why one idea more than another furnishes that we have strained our mental powers their cue, it would be comparatively easy a little too far. Lastly, there are dreams to follow out the chain of associations by whose origin is not in any past thought, but which they unroll themselves afterwards; in some sentiment vivid and pervading and to note the singular ease and delicacy enough to make itself dumbly felt even in whereby subordinate topics, recently sleep. Of the nature of the dreams so wafted across our minds, are seized and caused we shall speak presently. woven into the network of the dream. • Living Age, No. 1383, p. 598. Now The subject of a dream being, as we must now suppose, suggested to the brain on some such principles as the above, the next thing to be noted is, How does the brain treat its theme when it has got it? Does it drily reflect upon it, as we are wont to do awake? Or does it pursue a course wholly foreign to the laws of waking thoughts? It does, I conceive, neither one nor the other, but treats its theme, whenever it is possible to do so, according to a certain very important, though obscure, law of thought, whose action we are too apt to ignore. We have been accustomed to consider the myth-creating power of the human mind as one specially belonging to the earlier stages of growth of society and of the individual. It will throw, I think, a rather curious light on the subject if we discover that this instinct exists in every one of us, and exerts itself with more or less energy through the whole of our lives. In hours of waking consciousness, indeed, it is suppressed, or has only the narrowest range of exercise, as in the tendency, noticeable in all persons not of the very strictest veracity, to supplement an incomplete anecdote with explanatory incidents, or throw a slightly known story into the dramatic form, with dialogues constructed out of our own consciousness. But such small play of the myth-making faculty is nothing compared to its achievements during sleep. The instant that daylight and common sense are excluded, the fairy-work begins. At the very least half our dreams (unless I greatly err) are nothing else than myths formed by unconscious cerebation on the same approved principles, whereby Greece and India and Scandinavia gave to us the stories which we were once pleased to set apart as "mythology" proper. Have we not here, then, evidence that there is a real law of the human mind causing us constantly to compose ingenious fables explanatory of the phenomena around us, a law which only sinks into abeyance in the waking hours of persons in whom the reason has been highly cultivated, and which resumes its sway even over their well-tutored brains when they sleep? Most dreams lend themselves easily to the myth-making process; but pre-eminently dreams originating in Sensation or in Sentiment do so. Of those which arise from memory of Ideas only we shall speak by and by. Nothing can better illustrate the Sensation myth than the well-known story recorded of himself by Reid. "The only distinct dream I had ever since I was about sixteen, as far as I remember, was two years ago. I had got my head blistered for a fall. A plaster which was put on it after the blister pained me excessively for the whole night. In the morning I slept a little, and dreamed very distinctly that I had fallen into the hands of a party of Indians and was scalped."* The number of mental operations needful for the transmutation of the sensation of a blistered head into a dream of Red Indians, is very worthy of remark. First, Perception of pain, and allotment of it to its true place in the body. Secondly, Reason seeking the cause of the phenomenon. Thirdly, Memory suppressing the real cause, and supplying from its stores of knowledge an hypothesis of a cause suited to produce the phenomenon. Lastly, Imagination stepping in precisely at this juncture, fastening on this suggestion of memory, and instantly presenting it as a tableau vivant, with proper decorations and couleur locale. The only intellectual faculty which remains dormant seems to be the Judgment, which has allowed memory and imagination to work regardless of those limits of probability which would have been set to them awake. If, when awake, we feel a pain which we do not wholly understand, say a twinge in the foot, we speculate upon its cause only within the very narrow series of actual probabilities. It may be a nail in our boot, a chilblain, a wasp, or so on. It does not even cross our minds that it may be a sworn tormentor with red-hot pincers; but the same sensation experienced asleep will very probably be explained by a dream of the sworn tormentor or some other cause which the relations of time and space render equally inapplicable.† Works of Dugald Stuart. Edited by Sir W. Hamilton. Vol x. p. 321. †The analogy between insanity and a state of prolonged dream is too striking to be overlooked by any student of the latter subject. The delusions of insanity seem in fact little else but a series of such myths accounting for either sensations or sentiments as those above ascribed to dreaming. The maniac sees and hears more than a man asleep, and his delusions. He is also usually possessed by some sensations consequently give rise to numberless morbid moral sentiment, such as suspicion, hatred, avarice, or extravagant self-esteem (held by Dr. Carpenter nearly always to precede any intellectual failure), and these sentiments similarly give rise to their appropriate delusions. In the first case we fessions to Dr. Forbes Winslow ("Obscure Diseases have maniacs like the poor lady who wrote her conof the Brain," p. 79), and who describes how, on being taken to an asylum, the pillars before the door, the ploughed field in front, and other details, successively suggested to her the belief that she was in a Roman convent where she would be "scourged and taken to purgatory," and in a medical college where the inmates were undergoing a process preparatory to dissection! In the second case, that of morbid Sentiments, we have insane delusions like those which prompted the suspicious Rousseau to accuse Hume of poisoning him, and all the mournfully grotesque train of the victims of pride who fill our Let it be noted, however, that even in the waking brain a great deal of myth-making goes on after the formation of the most rational hypothesis. If we imagine that a pain is caused by any serious disease, we almost inevitably fancy we experience all the other symptoms of the malady, of which we happen to have heard-symptoms which disappear, as if by magic, when the physician laughs at our fears, and tells us our pain is caused by some trifling local affection. and some one else was buried in that grave wherein we saw the coffin lowered; sometimes a friendly physician has carried away the patient to his own home, and brought us there after long months to find him recovered by his care. One of the most affecting mythical dreams which have come to my knowledge, remarkable also as an instance of dreampoetry, is that of a lady who confessed to have been pondering on the day before her dream on the many duties which "bound Each of my readers could doubtless sup- her to life." The phrase which I have ply illustrations of myth-making as good used as a familiar metaphor became to her as that of Dr. Reid. It happened to me a visible allegory. She dreamed that Life once to visit a friend delirious from fever, a strong, calm, cruel woman - was bindwho lay in a bed facing a large old mir-ing her limbs with steel fetters, which she ror, whose gilt wood-frame, of Chinese design, presented a series of innumerable spikes, pinnacles, and pagodas. On being asked how she was feeling, my poor friend complained of much internal dolour, but added with touching simplicity: "And it is no great wonder, I am sure! (whisper) I've swallowed that looking-glass!" Again as regards Sentiments. If we have seen a forbidding-looking beggar in the streets in the morning, nothing is more probable than that our vague and transient sense of distrust will be justified by ingenious fancy taking up the theme at night, and representing a burglar bursting into our bedroom, presenting a pistol to our temples, and at the supreme moment disclosing the features of the objectionable mendicant. Hope, of course when vividly excited, represents for us scores of sweet scenes in which our desire is fulfilled with every pleasing variation; and Care and Fear have, alas! even more powerful machinery for the realization of their terrors. The longing of affection for the return of the dead has, perhaps more than any other sentiment, the power of creating myths of reunion, whose dissipation on awakening are amongst the keenest agonies of bereavement. By a singular semi-survival of memory through such dreams we seem always to be dimly aware that the person whose return we greet so rapturously has been dead; and the obvious incongruity of our circumstances, our dress, and the very sorrow we confide at once to their tenderness, with the sight of them again in their familiar places, drives our imagination to fresh shifts to explain it. Sometimes the beloved one has been abroad, and is come home; sometimes the death was a mistake, pauper hospitals with kings, queens, and prophets. Merely suppose these poor maniacs are recounting dreams, and there would be little to remark about them except their persistent character. felt as well as saw; and Death as an angel "Then I cried with weary breath, Ah, kind Death, it cannot be But cold Death makes no reply, A dream twice occurred to me at inter vals of years where the mythical character almost assumed the dimensions of the sublime, insomuch that I can scarcely recall it without awe. I dreamed that I was standing on a certain broad grassy space before the door of my old home. It was totally dark, but I was aware that I was in the midst of an immense crowd. We were all gazing upward into the murky sky, and a sense of some fearful calamity was over us, so that no one spoke aloud. Suddenly overhead appeared, through a rift in the black heavens, a branch of stars which I recognized as the belt and sword of Orion. Then went forth a cry of despair from all our hearts! We knew, though no one said it, that these stars proved it was not a cloud or mist, which, as we had somehow believed, was causing | theory may serve equally well for problems the darkness. No; the air was clear; it a little more dignified, and therefore more was high noon, and the sun had not risen! | liable to be treated superstitiously. That was the tremendous reason why we beheld the stars. The sun would never rise again! In the first place, a moment's reflection will show that the same sort of odd coincidences take place continually among the trivial events of waking life. It has chanced to myself within the last few hours to remark to a friend how the word In this dream, as it seems to me, a very complicated myth was created by my unconscious brain, which having first by some chance stumbled on the picture of a crowd" subtle" applied to the serpent in Genein the dark, and a bit of starry sky over them, elaborated, to account for such facts, the bold theory of the sun not having risen at noon; or (if we like to take it the other way) having hit on the idea of the sun's disappearance, invented the appropriate scenery of the breathless expectant crowd, and the apparition of the stars. sis, is always spelled "subtil," and within a few minutes to take up The Index, of Toledo, Ohio, and read the following anecdote: "A poor negro preacher was much troubled by the cheating of the sutlers of the army which he followed. He chose accordingly for the text of his sermon, Now the serpent was more sutler than any beast of the field,' &c." It will be owned that this is precisely the kind of chance coincidence which occurs in dreams, and which, when it happens to concern any solemn theme, is apt to seem portentous. But ascending beyond these trivial coincidences, we arrive at a mass of dreamliterature tending to show that revelations of all sorts of secrets and predictions of future events are made in dreams. Taking them in order, we have, first, discoveries of where money, wills, and all sorts of lost valuables are to be found, and such dreams have long been rightfully explained as having their origin in some nearly effaced re Next to the myth-creating faculty in dreams, perhaps the most remarkable circumstance about them is that which has given rise to the world-old notion that dreams are frequently predictions. At the outset of an examination of this matter, we are struck by the familiar fact that our most common dreams are continually recalled to us within a few hours by some insignificant circumstance bringing up again the name of the person or place about which we had dreamed. On such occasions, as the vulgar say, "My dream is out. Nothing was actually predicted, and nothing has occurred of the smallest consequence, or ever entailing any conse-membrance of information leading natuquence, but yet, by some concatenation of events, we dreamed of the man from whom we received a letter in the morning; or we saw in our sleep a house on fire, and before the next night we pass a street where there is a crowd, and behold! a dwelling in flames. Nay, much more special and out-of-the-way dreams than these come "out" very often. If we dream of Nebuchadnezzar on Saturday night, it is to be expected that on Sunday (unless the new lectionary have dispensed with his history) that the lesson of the day will present us with the ill-fated monarch and his golden image. Dreams of some almost unheardof spot, or beast, or dead-and-gone old worthy, which by wild vagary have entered our brain, are perpetually followed by a reference to the same spot, or beast, or personage, in the first book or newspaper we open afterwards. To account for such coincidences on any rational principle is, of course, difficult. But it is at least useful to attempt to do so, seeing that here, at all events, the supernatural hypothesis is too obviously absurd to be entertained by anybody; and if we can substitute for it a plausible theory in these cases, the same rally to the discovery. In sleep the lost clue is recovered by some association of thought, and the revelation is made with sufficient distinctness to ensure attention. A story of the sort is told by Macnish about a Scotch gentleman who recovered in a dream the address of a solicitor with whom his father on one single occasion deposited an important document on which the family fortunes ultimately depended. A singular occurrence which took place some years ago at the house of the late Earl of Minto in Scotland, can only be explained in a similar way. An eminent lawyer went to pay a few days' visit at Minto immediately before the hearing of an important case in which he was engaged as counsel. Naturally he brought with him the bundle of papers connected with the case, intending to study them in the interval; but on the morning after his arrival the packet could nowhere be found. Careful search of course was made for it, but quite in vain, and eventually the lawyer was obliged to go into court without his papers. Years passed without any tidings of the mysterious packet, till the same gentleman found himself again a guest at |