This is a subject of enquiry worthy of the most distinguished science.  We mean, to ascertain why certain senses are lost in sleep, while others preserve almost their full activity.  No physiologist has ever taken care of this matter.

Let us remark that the influences we are subject to when we sleep, are internal.  Thus, sensual ideas are nothing after the anguish we suffer at a dream of the death of a loved child.  At such moments we awake to find ourselves weeping bitterly.

Nature of dreams.

Whimsical as some of the ideas which visit us in dreams may be, we will on examination find they are either recollections, or combinations of memory.  I am inclined to say that dreams are the memory of sensations.

Their strangeness exists only in the oddity of association which rejects all idea of law and of chronology, of propriety and time.  No one, however, ever dreamed of any thing absolutely unknown to him.

No one will be amazed at the strangeness of our dreams, when we remember, that, when awake, our senses are on the alert, and respectively rectify each other.  When a man sleeps, however, every sensation is left to his own resources.

I am inclined to compare these two conditions of the brain, to a piano at which some great musician sits, and who as he throws his fingers over the keys recalls some melody which he might harmonize if he use all his power.  This comparison may be extended yet further, when we remember that reflection is to ideas, what harmony is to sounds; that certain ideas contain others, as a principle sound contains the others which follow it, etc. etc.

System of Dr. Gall.

Having followed thus far a subject which is not without interest, I have come to the confines of the system of Dr. Gall who sustains the multiformity of the organs of the brain.

I cannot go farther, nor pass the limits I have imposed on myself:  yet from the love of science, to which it may be seen I am no stranger, I cannot refrain from making known two observations I made with care, and which are the more important, as many persons will be able to verify them.

First observation.

About 1790 there was in a little village called Gevrin, in the arrondissement of Belley a very shrewd tradesman named Landot, who had amassed a very pretty fortune.

All at once he was stricken with paralysis.  The Doctors came to his assistance, and preserved his life, not however without loss, for all of his faculties especially memory was gone.  He however got on well enough, resumed his appetite and was able to attend to his business.

When seen to be in this state, all those with whom he ever had dealings, thought the time for his revenge was come, and under the pretext of amusing him, offered all kinds of bargains, exchanges, etc.  They found themselves mistaken, and had to relinquish their hopes.