260 An Essay on Dreaming, including 



sitVj its mode of action would probably have been, not to exhaust 

 the animal powers, but to paralyse the brain itself. The sleep 

 it would induce must therefore be speedily fatal. 



But in the instance of this woman and her family, it may still 

 be said, that the absence of sleep is sufficiently accounted for by 

 the unintermitting pain of cold and hunger. But more violent 

 pain than that of either could not postpone sleep for any consi- 

 derable duration. " Even stripes and tortures cannot keep off 

 sleep beyond a certain time*." 



If a great exhaustion of the animal powers — or possibly, to 

 advance a step nearer to the actual fact — if a great exhaustion 

 of the substance of the brain and nerves should be the conse- 

 quence of torture or over-exertion, such a state of those organs 

 must be favourable to the occurrence of the assimilating process ; 

 and if there is a supply of nourishment in the frame, it naturally 

 takes place, and the disturbance it necessarily creates in renewing 

 those delicate substances, may be the occasion of sleep : if there 

 is no nourishment to renew them, the consequence is not sleep, 

 but death : if there is nourishment, and that the torture or the 

 labour is beyond the strength of the individual to endure, the brain, 

 as already mentioned in the case of excessive cold, becomes torpid 

 and paralysed, and death, under these circumstances, also follows 

 of course. 



It is well worth inquiry, whether those various vegetable sub- 

 stances, which, being taken into the stomach, " bring on a con- 

 dition of the brain favourable to sleep f," do not operate in the 

 same manner; and in place of producing the process of assimila- 

 tion, affect the brain with a temporary paralysis. — If they bring 

 on this process, they must be useful auxiliaries — if wo/, and this 

 is the more probable part of the dilemma, whatever be their ap- 

 parent effects, they can only be prejudicial, unless where they are 

 administered, not as soporifics but as anodynes. 



The several circumstances just under review, afford an easy 

 explication of the numerous facts detailed by the same writer. 

 There is no reason to suppose that the process of assimilation had 

 not materials to carry on its operations in " those boys who were 

 completely exhausted by exertion, and fell asleep amid all the 

 tumult of the b?ttle of the Nile J," nor in the soldiers " sleeping 

 amid discharges of artillery, and all the tumult of war," " nor the 

 couriers sleeping on horseback, nor coachmen on their coaches." 

 This last is a very common phaenomenon in this country; but I 

 fear we must ascribe the peculiarity in question rather to the 

 paralysing effects of vegetable products taken into the stomach, 

 than to the more wholesome accession of the assimilating pro- 

 cess. 



• Rees's Cyc. f U. J Id. 



Most 



