July 25, 1884.1 



* KNO^AALEDGE • 



65 



11 

 AN ILLUSTRATED ^^J^T 



__ MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE 

 ^AINLYWORDED -exactlyDescribed 



LONDON: FRIDAY, JULY ^T^, 1884. 



Contents op No. 143. 



PAGE 



Dreams. Y. By Edward Clodd .,, 00 

 The Antarctic Hegions. By R. A. 



Vroclor t^ti 



Sensation in a Severed Head 67 



The Electro -Magnet. By W. SUngo. 



illlu*.) 63 



Other Worlds than Ours. By M. 



de FonteneUe. With Notes by 



Richard A. Proctor 60 



Novel Tricycles. By John Browning 70 



?A6B 



The International Health Eihibi* 



tion. IX. (Itlitx.) 71 



Thunderstorms... 73 



Reviews 75 



Miscellanea 76 



Correspondence : Dickens's Story 

 Left Half Told (No. 139)— The 



Solar Glow, &c 77 



Oar Mathematical Coluam 79 



Our Chesa Golonm SO 



DREAMS : 



THEIR PLACE IX THE GROWTH OP PRIMITIVE 

 BELIEFS. 



By Edward Clodd. 

 \. 



THE confusion in the barbaric mind between the objec- 

 tive and the subjective, and between the name and 

 the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the fore- 

 going chapters, will enable us to see more clearly how the 

 like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such 

 occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their 

 kind. 



They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining 

 that feeling of mystery -which attends man's endeavour to 

 get at the meaning of his surroundings. The phantasies 

 which have detiled through the brain in coherent order, or 

 danced in mazy whirl about its siuuous passages when com- 

 plete sleep was lacking, leave their footprints on the 

 memory, and they are strong of head and heart, true pep- 

 ticiaiis, like the countryman cited by Carlyle, who, "for 

 his part, had no system," whose composure on awaking is 

 not affected by the harmonious or discordant, the pleasant 

 or disagreeable illusions -which have made up their dreams. 

 In the felicitous words of Luci'etius, " when sleep has 

 chained down our limbs in sweet slumber, and the whole 

 body is sunk in profound repose, yet then -we seem to our- 

 selves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and amid 

 the thick darkness of night we think we see the sun and 

 the daylight ; and though in a confined room, we seem to 

 be passing to new climates, seas, rivers, mountains, and to 

 be ^crossing plains on foot, and to hear voices, though the 

 austere silence of night prevails all round, and to be utter- 

 ing speech, though qnite silent. Many are the other things 

 of this marvellous sort we see, -which all seek to shake, as 

 it -were, the credit of the senses : quite in vain, since the 

 greatest part of these cases cheat us on account of the 

 mental suppositions which we add of ourselves, taking those 

 things as seen -which have not been seen by the senses. 

 For nothing is harder than to separate manifest facts from 

 doubtful, -which the mind without hesitation adds on of 

 itself."* 



*De rerum Natura, B. IV. U. 453-468. 



While for us dreams fill an empty moment in the telling, 

 albeit now and again nurturing such remains of superstition 

 as cling to the m.ijority of people, they are to the untrained 

 intdligcnce, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, or to 

 fullow any sequence of ideas, as solid as the experiences of 

 -waking u.oments. As a Zulu, well expressing the limits 

 of savage thought, said to Bishop Callanay, " Our knowledge 

 does not urge us to search out the roots of it, we do not 

 try to see them, if anyone thinks ever so little, he soon 

 gives it up, and passes on to what he sees with his eyes ; 

 and he does not understand the real state of even what he 

 sees." Kor does his language clear the confusion within 

 when he tells what he has seen and heard and felt, where 

 he has been and what he has done, for the speech cannot 

 transcend the thought, and therefore can represent neither 

 to himself nor to his hearers the difference between the 

 illusions of the night and the realities of the day. The 

 dead relatives and fiiends who appear in dreams and live 

 their old life, with whom he joins in the battle, the chase, 

 and the feast, the foes with whom he struggles, the wild 

 beasts from whom he flees, or in whose clutches he feels 

 himself, and with shrieks awakens his squaw, the long 

 distances he travels to sunnier climes lit by a light that 

 never was on land or sea, are all real, and no " baseless 

 fabric of a vision." That now and again he should have 

 walked in his sleep, would confirm the seeming reality ; 

 still more so would the inten>ified form of dreaming called 

 " nightmare," (or night>spirit) when hideous spectres sit 

 upon the breast, stopping breath and paralysing motion, 

 and to which is largely due the creation of the vast army 

 of nocturnal demons that fill the folk-lore of the world, and 

 that, under infinite variety of repellent form, have had 

 place in the hierarchy of religions. 



Dreams are in the main referred by the savage either to 

 the entrance into him of some outside .spirit — as among the 

 Fijians, who believe that the spirit of a living man will 

 leave the body to trouble sleeping folk — or to the real 

 doings of himself. 



When the Cireenlander dreams of hunting, or fishing, or 

 courting, he believes that the soul quits the body ; the 

 Dyaks of Borneo think that during sleep the soul some- 

 times remains in the body or travels far a-\vay, being en- 

 dowed, whether present or absent, with conditions which 

 in -naking moments are lacking. Wherever we find a low 

 state of mental development the like belief exists. In 

 Mr. im Thurn's elaborate work on the Indians of Guiana, 

 already reviewed in this journal, we have corroborative 

 evidence, the more valuable because of its freshness. He 

 tells us that the dreams which come to the Indian are to 

 him as real as any of the events of his waking life. To him 

 dream-acts and waking acts difler only in one respect — 

 namely, that the former are done only by the spirit, the 

 latter are done by the spirit in its body. Seeing other men 

 asleep, and afterwards hearing from them the things which 

 they suppose themselves to have done when asleep, the 

 Indian has no difliculty in reconciling that which he hears 

 with the fact that the bodies of the sleepers v.cre in his 

 sif;ht and motionless throughout the time of supposed 

 action, because he never question that the spirits, leaving 

 the sleepers, played their part in di'eam-adventures. Mr. 

 im Thurn illustrates the complete belief of the Indian in 

 the unbroken continuity of his dream life and waking-life 

 by incidents which came under his own notice, and which 

 are quoted as serving the argument of this paper better 

 than any theorising. 



" One morning when it was important to me to get away 

 from a camp on the Es.sequibo River, at which I had been 

 detained for some days by the illness of some of my Indian 

 companion?, I found that one of the invalids, a young 



