850 The American Naturalist. [October, 
the intensely dramatic manner in which the solution of the problem he 
was engaged on was conveyed to his mind. I will now simply quote 
from the account given to Prof. William Romaine Newbold, by Pro- 
fessor Hilprecht, in the first place of a train of sub-conscious reason- 
ing during sleep which put him on the track of a satisfactory rendering 
of an Assyrian proper name; and in the second place of the work 
carried out under the influence of a strangely dramatic dream.’ 
“During the winter 1882-3, Professor Hilprecht was working with 
Professor Friedrich Delitzsch, and was preparing to publish as his 
dissertation, a text, transliteration and translation of a stone of Nebu- 
chadnezzar I, with notes. He accepted at that time the explanation 
given by Professor Delitzsch of the name Nebuchadnezzar, ‘ Nabû- 
kudurru-usur,’ ‘Nebo protect my mason’s pad’ or mortar board,’ i. e., 
‘my work asa builder.’ One night, after working late, he went to bed 
about two o’clock in the morning. After a somewhat ‘restless sleep, he 
awoke with his mind full of the thought that the name should be trans- 
lated ‘ Nebo protect my boundary.’ He had a dim consciousness of 
having been working at his table in a dream, but could never recall the 
details of the process by which he arrived at this conclusion. Reflecting 
upon it when awake, however, he at once saw that kudurru, ‘ boundary,’ 
could be derived from the verb kadaru, to enclose. Shortly afterwards 
he published this translation in his dissertation, and it has since been 
mir adopted.” 
Mr. Newbold then gives a translation from asa account written in 
German by Prof. Hilprecht of his remarkable dre 
“ One Saturday evening, about the middle of March, 1893, I had been 
wearying myself, as I had done so often in the weeks preceding, in the 
vain attempt to decipher two small fragments of agate which were 
supposed to belong to the finger rings of some Babylonian. The labor 
was much increased by the fact that the fragments presented remnants 
only of characters and lines, that dozens of similar small fragments had 
been found in the temple of Bel, at Nippur, with which nothing could 
be done, that in this case furthermore I had never had the originals 
before me, but only a hasty sketch made by one of the members of the 
expedition sent by the University of Pennsylvania to Babylonia. 
I could not say more than that the fragments, taking into consideration 
the place where they were found and the peculiar characteristics of the 
cuneiform characters preserved upon them, sprang from the Cassite 
period of Babylonian history (ca. 1700-1140 B. C.); moreover, as the 
first character of the third line of the first fragment seemed to be KU, I 
3 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, for June, 1896, pp. 13-17. 
