380 MAURY ON SLEEP AND DREAMS. 



defined as dreaming descends in the scale, it would be 

 impossible to say. Probably there is a gradation down- 

 wards in the same ratio as the sensorial faculties, and 

 vanishing with them. The fact of dreaming in the 

 higher animals is most familiar to us in the Dog that 

 noble creature ad hominum commoditates generatus, 

 as Cicero says of him at once a companion and solace 

 to man, and a subject for profound thought to all who 

 care to reflect on the great problem of our relations to 

 the inferior animal creation. The admission of the 

 fact does not, however, carry us beyond the presump- 

 tion that the dreams of other animals are a vague copy 

 of the sensations and acts of their waking lives ; with 

 little of the intellectual part if such it may be called 

 of the human dream. ' To urge in dreams the forest 

 chase ' is the happy phrase of a poet, than whom no 

 one better knew, or better loved, the Dog. And nothing 

 is more likely than the fact here presumed. But seeing 

 the difficulty of rightly remembering and expounding 

 human dreams, there can be little chance of penetrating 

 the mystery as presented to us in another and lower 

 scale of being. 



Thus far we have been speaking of the general 

 characters of Sleep as a function of life. In what 

 follows we shall seek, upon our own observation and 

 that of others, to describe the phenomena more in de- 

 tail ; associating them with those of Dreams, from 

 which, as we have seen, they can hardly be separated, 

 even should there be certain conditions of sleep wholly 

 free from this kindred. 



