system that enables us to say that they are mental. So all this evidence goes, after all, to show a correspondence between the mental and the conscious. This Prof. Lipps does not seem to see, and his treatment of the question from a purely verbal and analytic point of view was consequently very inadequate.

In the higher fields of ethics and anthropology there were interesting papers, of which my space allows the mention of only one on "Ethical Values," by Prof. Ehrenfels (just called from Vienna to Prague), and one on the "Category of Individuality in Savage Thought," by Mr. Stout, the editor of Mind. Mr. Stout, I may add, has just been called to a lectureship in comparative psychology in the University of Aberdeen a novelty for the British Isles, but appropriate in the institution which Prof. Bain has made famous in connection with psychological study. The next Congress is to meet in Paris in 1900 in connection with the Universal Exposition. Prof. Ribot will be President; M. Ch. Richet, Vice-President, and M. Pierre Janet, Secretary. The International Committee for the Paris meeting has the following American representatives: Profs. James (Harvard), Titchener (Cornell), Hall (Clark), and Baldwin (Princeton).

I cannot close this letter without referring-with profound regret, which many other American students of philosophy must also feel-to the death Prof. Avenarius, of Zurich, on August 18. Where I now write, the feeling that one of the greatest philosophical thinkers of Europe no longer adorns a Swiss university is very acute; and those who know the work of Prof. Avenarius must feel it also, regardless of the place of their habitation.-J. MARK BALDWIN, in New York Evening Post, Sept. 12.

Mental Action During Sleep, or Sub-Conscious Reasoning. Shortly after reading the interesting article by Professor Cope with regard to recent ethnological discoveries in Assyria, undertaken under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, and elucidated by Professor Hilprecht, I met with the account of a peculiarly curious dream which had been experienced by Professor Hilprecht whilst his mind was deeply occupied with these very investigations.

It is of course well known to all students of mental psychology, that the most complicated, abstruse forms of reasoning have often been carried out in dreams; and many interesting and well authenticated cases of this phenomenon will be found in Dr. Carpenter's Mental Physiology. But the peculiarity of Dr. Hilprecht's dream consists in

2 Chap. XIII, Unconscious Cerebration. Mental Physiology. W. R. Carpenter, M. D. Chap. XV, Of Sleep, Dreaming and Sonnambulism, pp. 534, 593–5.

the intensely dramatic manner in which the solution of the problem he was engaged on was conveyed to his mind. I will now simply quote from the account given to Prof. William Romaine Newbold, by Professor Hilprecht, in the first place of a train of sub-conscious reasoning during sleep which put him on the track of a satisfactory rendering of an Assyrian proper name; and in the second place of the work carried out under the influence of a strangely dramatic dream.'

"During the winter 1882-3, Professor Hilprecht was working with Professor Friedrich Delitzsch, and was preparing to publish as his dissertation, a text, transliteration and translation of a stone of Nebuchadnezzar I, with notes. He accepted at that time the explanation given by Professor Delitzsch of the name Nebuchadnezzar, Nabûkudurru usur,' 'Nebo protect my mason's pad' or mortar board,' i. e., 'my work as a builder.' One night, after working late, he went to bed about two o'clock in the morning. After a somewhat restless sleep, he awoke with his mind full of the thought that the name should be translated Nebo protect my boundary.' He had a dim consciousness of having been working at his table in a dream, but could never recall the details of the process by which he arrived at this conclusion. Reflecting upon it when awake, however, he at once saw that kudurru, 'boundary,' could be derived from the verb kadaru, to enclose. Shortly afterwards he published this translation in his dissertation, and it has since been universally adopted."

Mr. Newbold then gives a translation from the account written in German by Prof. Hilprecht of his remarkable dream.

"One Saturday evening, about the middle of March, 1893, I had been wearying myself, as I had done so often in the weeks preceding, in the vain attempt to decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the finger rings of some Babylonian. The labor was much increased by the fact that the fragments presented remnants only of characters and lines, that dozens of similar small fragments had been found in the temple of Bel, at Nippur, with which nothing could be done, that in this case furthermore I had never had the originals before me, but only a hasty sketch made by one of the members of the expedition sent by the University of Pennsylvania to Babylonia. I could not say more than that the fragments, taking into consideration the place where they were found and the peculiar characteristics of the cuneiform characters preserved upon them, sprang from the Cassite period of Babylonian history (ca. 1700-1140 B. C.); moreover, as the first character of the third line of the first fragment seemed to be KU, I

* Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, for June, 1896, pp. 13-17.

ascribed this fragment, with an interrogation point, to King Kurigalzu, whilst I placed the other fragment as unclassifiable, with other Cassite fragments, upon a page of my book where I published the unclassifiable fragments. The proofs already lay before me, but I was far from satisfied. The whole problem passed again through my mind that March evening before I placed my mark of approval under the last correction in the book. About midnight, weary and exhausted, I went to bed, and was soon in deep sleep. Then I dreamed the following remarkable dream. A tall, thin priest of the old pre-Christian Nippur, about forty years of age, and clad in a simple abba, led me to the treasure chamber of the temple on its southeast side. He went with me into a small, lowceiled room without windows, in which there was a large wooden chest, while scraps of agate and lapis lazuli lay scattered on the floor. Here he addressed me as follows: The two fragments which you have published separately upon pages 22 and 26, belong together, are not finger rings, and their history is as follows: King Kurigalzu (ca. 1300 B. C.) once sent to the temple of Bel, among other articles of agate and lapis lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of the god Ninib a pair of earrings of agate. We were in great dismay, as there was no agate as raw material at hand. In order to execute the command there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into three parts, thus making three rings, each of which contained a proportion of the original inscription. The first two rings served as earrings for the statue of the god; the two fragments, which have given you so much trouble, are portions of them. If you will put the two together you will have a confirmation of my words. But the third ring you have not yet found in the course of your excavations, and you never will find it.' With this the priest disappeared. I awoke at once, and immediately told my wife the dream, that I might not forget it. Next morning-Sunday-I examined the fragments once more in the light of these disclosures, and to my astonishment found all the details of the dream precisely verified in so far as the means of verification were in my hands. The original inscription on the votive cylinder read: To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.'

"The problem was thus at last solved. I stated in the preface that I had unfortunately discovered too late that the two fragments belonged together; made the corresponding changes in the Table of Contents,' pp. 50 and 52; and it being not possible to transpose the fragments, as the plates were already made, I put in each plate a brief reference to the other. [Cf. Hilprecht, "The Babylonian Expedition of the Uni

versity of Pennsylvania," Series A, Cuneiform Texts, Vol I, Part 1, "Old Babylonian Inscriptions, chiefly from Nippur.] H. V. Hilprecht." Upon the priest's statement that the fragments were those of a votive cylinder, Professor Hilprecht makes the following comment:

"There are not many of these votive cylinders. I had seen, all told, up to that evening, not more than two. They very much resemble the so-called seal cylinders, but usually have no pictorial representation on them, and the inscription is not reversed, not being intended for use in sealing, but is written as it is read."

Then there follows a transliteration of the inscription in the Sumerian language. Mrs. Hilprecht's statement is as follows:

"I was awakened from sleep by a sigh, immediately thereafter heard a spring from the bed, and at the same moment saw Professor Hilprecht hurrying into his study. Thence came the cry, 'It is so, it is so!' Grasp ing the situation, I followed him and satisfied myself in the midnight. hour as to the outcome of his most interesting dream."

Signed, "J. C. Hilprecht."

A few weeks after the occurrence of this curious dream, there ap peared a difficulty which Professor Hilprecht was not able to explain. "According to the memoranda in our possession, the fragments were of different colors, and, therefore, could have scarcely belonged to the same object. The original fragments were in Constantinople, and it was with no little interest that I [Mr. Newbold] awaited Prof. Hilprecht's return from the trip which he made thither in the summer of 1893. I translate again his own account of what he then ascertained.

“In August, 1893, I was sent by the Committee on the Babylonian Expedition to Constantinople, to catalogue and study the objects got from Nippur, and preserved there in the Imperial Museum. It was to me a matter of the greatest interest to see for myself the objects which, according to my dream, belonged together, in order to satisfy myself that they had both originally been parts of the same votive cylinder. Halil Bey, the director of the museum, to whom I told my dream, and of whom I asked permission to see the objects, was so interested in the matter that he at once opened all the cases of the Babylonian section, and requested me to search. Father Scheil, an Assyriologist from Paris, who had examined and arranged the articles excavated by us, before me, had not recognized the fact that these fragments belonged together, and consequently I found one fragment in one case and the other in a case far away from it. As soon as I found the fragments and put them together, the truth of the dream was demonstrated ad oculosthey had, in fact, once belonged to one and the same votive cylinder.

As it had been originally of finely veined agate, the stone-cutter's saw had accidentally divided the object in such a way that the whitish vein of the stone appeared only upon the one fragment, and the larger gray surface upon the other. Thus I was able to explain Dr. Peters' discordant descriptions of the two fragments."

There are, says Mr. Newbold, two especial points of interest in this case, the character of the information conveyed, and the dramatic form in which it was put. The apparently novel points of information given

were:

1. That the fragments belonged together.

2. That they were fragments of a votive cylinder.

3. That the cylinder was presented by King Kurigalzu.

4. That it was dedicated to Ninib.

5. That it had been made into a pair of earrings.

6. That the" treasure chamber" was located on the southeast side of the temple.

We have a point de repère for the treasure chamber part of the dream, in the fact, that Dr. Peters, as far back as 1891, had told Professor Hilprecht of the discovery of a room in which were remnants of a wooden box, while the floor was strewn with fragments of agate and lapis lazuli. The other points in the dream may be accounted for by the direction in which Professor Hilprecht's thoughts had been travelling, or they may not; I must confess to thinking they cannot all be so accounted for.-ALICE BODINGTON.

NOTE. I would advise anyone interested in the subject of subconscious reasoning in dreams, to read at length the account given by William A. Lamberton, Professor of Greek in the University of Pennsylvania, of a dream in which he solved geometrically a difficult problem which he had attacked from its algebraic and analytic side. The point de repère here seems to have been a blackboard which had formerly had a functional use in the room, but which had been painted over, the black still showing through the white paint. Professor Lamberton, on opening his eyes one morning, about a week after he had determined to banish this insolvable problem from his mind, saw upon this blackboard surface a complete figure, containing not only the lines given by the problem, but also a number of auxiliary lines, and just such lines as without further thought solved the problem at once.

"I sprang from bed," says Prof. Lamberton, "and drew the figure on paper; needless to say, perhaps, that the geometrical solution being Two curious cases of the dramatic form taken occasionally by dreams will be found on p. 18, Proceedings S. P. R. for June, 1896.