160 The American Naturalist. [February, 



had been kept awake for 90 consecutive hours, during which time 

 careful experimental tests were made of his physical and mental con- 

 dition, and the results were reported in detail. Among the more in- 

 teresting of these results were, continuous increase in weight, relatively 

 s i i lt 1 1 1 loss of muscular strength, the production of visual hallucinations, 

 and the sudden disappearance of all symptoms after only 101 hours of 

 sleep — about 25 per cent, of that which had been lost. 



Prof. Wesley Mills, of Mel lill University, Montreal, announced his 

 intention of contributing at the next meeting "f the Association further 

 researches on the psychic development of young animals and its phy- 

 sical correlations. 



Prof Lightner Witmer, of the University of Pennsylvania, read a 

 paper on " Variations in the Patellar Reflex as an Aid in Mental 

 Analysis. Dr. Witmer described the apparatus aud the method used 

 to determine, 1st, The extent of the normal jerk ; 2d, the increment 

 duo to the synergic activity of the cortical processes concerned in sen- 

 sation, thoughts, etc. His results he regarded as tentative only; they 

 appeared, however, to show (1) that sensation or thought processes 

 which did not directly tend to produce movement had little effect upon 

 the knee jerk ; (2) that all processes which tended to produce muscu- 

 lo! contraction in any part of the body tended to increase the knee jerk ; 

 i 3) that this increase was quite as marked in the case of the thought of 

 a movement as in that of the movement itself. 



Prof, dames H. Hvslop, of Columbia, reported a series of experi- 

 ments on hallucinations induced by a crystal. He did not attempt to 



cases the phantasms po.-^ibu indicated some unknown method of ac- 

 quiring information. 



Prof. W. it. New boh! narrated infocnia i\ three cases vaguely de- 

 scribed as - Dream Reasoning,'* which had occurred in the experience 

 of two of his colleagues. Dr. W. A. Lamberton, Professor of Greek 

 in the University of Pennsylvania, when a young man, after giving up 

 as insolable :h he had been 



working for weeks by the analytical method, awoke one morning 

 several days later to find an hallucinatory figure projected upon a 

 blackboard in his room with all the lines necessary to a geometrical 

 solution of the problem clearly drawn. He has never had any other 

 visual hallucination. Dr. H. V. Hilprecht, Professor of Assyriology 

 in the University of Pennsylvania, some years ago dreamed an inter- 

 pretation of the name v Iia< since been univer- 



sally adopted. At a later period he dreamed that an Assyrian priest 



