1895. SOME NEW BOOKS. 275 



we venture to think, sufficiently well labelled ; for instance, those 

 showing the tendons of the foot and the diagram of the peripheral 

 nervous system of the bird. More especially do these remarks apply 

 to the nerves of the sacral plexus. From the point of view'of avian 

 anatomy, this plexus contains the most interesting nerves of the body, 

 and yet there is nothing to aid the uninitiated to differentiate one 

 nerve from another. The more important of the visceral nerves are, 

 however, duly identified, yet these have comparatively only a secondary 

 interest. Points like these, however, are but minor blemishes ; few 

 but specialists interest themselves much in anatomical questions, and 

 such have Dr. Gadow's larger works to consult. 



This is a work unique of its kind, embracing, as it does, the whole 

 field of Ornithology, and is based upon the latest research and dis- 

 covery both in England and abroad. To those who live out of reach 

 of large libraries, and who do not read any language but their own, 

 it will prove a boon indeed. 



W. P. Pycraft. 



The Stuff that Dreams are made of. 



Imagination in Dreams and their Study. By Frederick Greenwood. London : 

 John Lane, 1894. 



We are in full agreement with Mr. Frederick Greenwood, even 

 though he quote Dr. Ward Richardson, as a man of science, against 

 himself, that a reference of dreams to the action of the sleepless 

 sympathetic system is not so much as the beginning of an explanation. 

 In whatever way they be roused, whether by an uneasy qualm of 

 the full stomach, or by a cold breath playing on the naked foot, the 

 vivid and elusory inhabitants of our dreaming brain are citizens of the 

 mind itself. And we welcome his book as a delicate and graceful 

 contribution to the study of mind. 



The little book is divided into two chapters, of some hundred 

 short pages a piece. Of the second, dealing with the study of dreams, 

 we have little to say. It disclaims narrow materialistic and sceptical 

 " explanation " of them as being shallow and self-satisfied conceit ; it 

 discards supernatural explanation but with a lesser zeal. It calls on 

 us to study them ; with our reasons, not clothed with an assumed and 

 conventional garb of humorous tolerance, but naked and unashamed. 



The other chapter, on imagination in dreams, sets forth the 

 matter and the suggestion, in what we take to be a deliberate 

 mingling. Waking imagination, although the most compelling of 

 faculties, seems to piece together only the memories of things seen or 

 heard or read. Even under the powerful influence of religion, the 

 imagination, trying to picture heaven, has invented nothing unknown 

 on earth. But the dreaming imagination seems creative. Sometimes 

 it peoples the visions of the night with known faces ; but sometimes, 

 too, the faces that come are arresting, insistent. They impress our 

 consciousness by strange significance, or, and this is even more strik- 

 ing to the reflective mind, by trivial detail, and the mind searches in 

 vain for them among its memories. Are such things in reality 

 memories, and are they unrecognised because the memory is asleep ? 

 " Is it that amongst the drowsy faculties is the one which has custody 

 of the dim population of the brain called remembrances?" Mr. 

 Greenwood doubts this ; holding that the memory when we are asleep 

 is actively called upon in our dreams ; and that the memory when we 

 awake, although active because it is telling us our dream, still fails to 

 recall the intruding face. The other suggestion is that the faces were 



