Litcraiy Notices. v 



brain functioning. At any rate Helraholtz adds another to the rather 

 suggestive list of great thinkers who carried through Hfe the marks of 

 an early attack of hydrocephalus. 



In this connection attention may be called to a set of facts in 

 themselves well enough known but which seem to be singularly ignored 

 by pedagogic writers and practical psychologists. It is a fact of every- 

 day knowledge that many forms of functional disorder, those that can- 

 not be regarded as really pathological, such as the exhaustions and per- 

 turbations of puberty and the effects of excessive fatigue or worry, pro- 

 duce slight abnormalities in the sense-organs as well as in the central 

 system, lliese we detect in the day time as musccs volitantes in the 

 eyes, as tension and subjective sounds in the ears, as formiculating dis- 

 tress in the skin, and puritis, as well as all sorts of hypen^esthesias of all 

 the senses. At night these physiological irritants reveal themselves in 

 the form of pictorial illusions composed by the phantasy upon the basis 

 of these sensory stimuh. The sense element gives to such images a 

 degree of objectivity so that the pictures move with the motion of the 

 eyes and vary with the' changes in the stimulus. It is of such material 

 that the foundation of dreams is laid. Now if the comparatively slight 

 physiological changes mentioned are competent stimuli for determin- 

 ing brain activity, how much more those constant or intermittent stim- 

 uli resulting from some hidden source of irritation. The irritability 

 growing out of the suppression of certain important functions of the 

 body has been responsible for many a poem and work of art, just as the 

 irritation of the menopause has given us agitators of sundry remarkable 

 reforms or instigated fanatical anti-vivisection campaigns. 



c. L- H. 



Ffro— L'iustinot s<*X)H'l.' 



This volume is a pleasant contrast to much of the recent litera- 

 ture upon this and related subjects. It is a healthful, clean and thor- 

 oughly practical book dealing frankly and yet tactfully with problems 

 of the greatest importance to sociology, morals and practical philan- 

 thropy. The author's main thesis is to demonstrate that the sexual 

 instincts, both in their normal and in most of their pathological phases, 

 have not that inflexible coercive power over the individual which some 

 authors would claim for them. He insists that they are amenable to 

 control, and he puts this control where it belongs — with the individual. 



1 L'instinct sexuel, evolution et dissolution, par le Docteur Ch. Fere, med- 

 ecin de Bicetre. i vol., 12 mo., pp. 246; 4 fr. (Paris, F^lix Alcan editeur.) 



