242 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



In actual use such languages must have required much 

 gesture and finger-sketching in the air. The letters of 

 the Egyptians largely consist of animals and birds, 

 which represent both sounds and ideas. Dreaming over 

 the embers of his fire, the Cave-man saw pass before his 

 mental vision all the circumstances of the chase, ending 

 with the crash when the mammoth crushed into the pit, 

 at which he would start and partially awake. Intent- 

 ness of mind upon a pursuit causes an equivalent intent- 

 ness of dream, and thus wild races believe their dreams 

 to be real and substantial things, and not mere shadows 

 of the night. To those who do not read or write much, 

 even in our days, dreams are much more real than to 

 those who are continuously exercising the imagination. 

 If you use your imagination all day you will not fear it 

 at night. Since I have been occupied with literature 

 my dreams have lost all vividness and are less real than 

 the shadows of trees, they do not deceive me even in 

 my sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed 

 to call up figures at will before my eyes, which stand 

 out well defined and coloured to the very hue of their 

 faces. If I see these or have disturbed visions during 

 the night they do not affect me in the least. The less 

 literary a people the more they believe in dreams ; the 

 disappearance of superstition is not due to the cultiva- 

 tion of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to 

 the mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually 

 puts figures and aerial shapes before the mental gaze 

 that in time those that occur naturally are thought no 

 more of than those conjured into existence by a book. 

 It is in far-away country places, where people read very 

 little, that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of 

 fate. Their dreams are real. 



The mammoth came through his cave before the 



