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 aérial 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 
