Literary Notices. xxvii 



trum gains in relative color value while, in case of admixture with 

 white or any other method of increasing the energy, the left portion of 

 the spectrum increases in relative color value. c. L. H. 



The Emotional Content of Dreams.' 



The author arrives at practically the same result as that reached 

 by the writer of these hnes, namely that the essential content in dreams 

 is not the intellectual but the feeling element. He says " Our human 

 grief and joy root in action and the drama of life and this canon we 

 apply to the interpretation of our dreams." The truth of this interpre- 

 tation he calls in question and very justly, for, as he says, the physio- 

 logical facts are directly hostile to the hypothesis of a rich ideational 

 content. The dream, he concludes, " consists of a succession of in- 

 tense states of feeling supported by a minimum of ideational content." 

 " The feeling is primary; the idea-content is the inferred thing." The 

 present writer, in the course of a study of dreams extending over a 

 series of months, arrived at the same conclusion as the result of the 

 constant experience that the dreams, when recorded with closed eyes 

 before the blood currents were accelerated by a change of position 

 were found quite or nearly devoid of intellectual content, while those 

 taken after rising had a garb of intellectual interpretation which was 

 generally congruous in proportion to the time that had elapsed since 

 awakening. 2 An interesting report of the subjective experiences dur- 

 ing recovery from the effects of nitrous oxide in the same number of 

 the Review adds confirmation to this hypothesis. 



c, L. H. 



TECHNIQUE. 



Experiments witli the Weigcrt Methods.^ 



The experiments detailed in this paper were conducted in connec- 

 tion with a research now in progress at the Pathological Institute of 

 the New York Commission in Lunacy and, as these data, so far as they 

 have any permanent value, will be of especial interest to comparative 



1 Robert MacDougall. The Intellectual Content in Dream Conscious- 

 ness. Psychol. Review, V. 2. 



"^CL /ourn. Comp. Neurology, Vol. Ill, p. 17, 1893. 



* Report upon a Series of Experiments with the Weigert Methods, with 

 Special Reference for use in Lower Brain Morphology. By C. JUDSON Her- 

 RICK, Associate in Comparative Neurology, Pathological Institute of the New 

 \ork State Hospitals; Professor of Zoology, Denison University. Utica, 

 N. Y., State Hospitals Bulletin, October, 1897. Issued May, 189S. 



