Binet[24] has studied experimentally the automatic substitution of some adjacent association in his hysterics. If he pricked the anæsthetic hand of the patient without his noticing the prick, he thought of "points"; if the anæsthetic finger was moved, he thought of "sticks" or "columns." When the anæsthetic hand, concealed from the patient's sight by a screen, writes "Salpêtrière," she sees in front of her the word "Salpêtrière" in white writing on a black ground. This recalls the experiments above referred to of Guinon and Sophie Waltke. We thus find in our subject, at a time when there was nothing to indicate the later phenomena, rudimentary automatisms, fragments of dream manifestations, which imply in themselves the possibility that some day more than one association would creep in between the perception of the dispersed attention and consciousness. The misreading shows us, moreover, a certain automatic independence of the psychical elements. This occasionally expands to a more or less fleeting dispersion of attention, although with very slight results which are never in any way striking or suspicious; this dispersedness approximates to that of the physiological dream. The misreading can be thus conceived as a prodromal symptom of the later events; especially as its psychology is prototypical for the mechanism of somnambulic dreams, which are indeed nothing but a many-sided multiplication and manifold variation of the elementary processes reviewed above. I never succeeded in demonstrating during my observations similar rudimentary automatisms. It would seem that in course of time the states of dispersed attention, to a certain extent beneath the surface of consciousness, at first of low degree have grown into these remarkable somnambulic attacks; hence they disappeared during the waking state, which was free from attacks. So far as concerns the development of the patient's character, beyond a certain not very extensive ripening, no remarkable change could be demonstrated during the observations lasting nearly two years. More remarkable is the fact that in the two years since the cessation (complete?) of the somnambulic attacks, a considerable change in character has taken place. We shall have occasion later on to speak of the importance of this observation.