“Mr. R. awoke in the morning with all the events of the vision impressed on his mind, and thought it worth while to ride across the country to Inveresk, instead of going to Edinburgh. When he came there he waited on the gentleman mentioned in the dream, a very old man; without saying anything of the vision, he inquired whether he remembered having conducted such a matter for his deceased father. The old gentleman could not at first bring the circumstance to his recollection, but, on mention of the Portugal piece of gold, the whole returned upon his memory; he made an immediate search for the papers and recovered them, so that Mr. R. carried to Edinburgh the documents necessary to gain the cause which he was on the verge of losing.” Here it would be a valuable addition to knowledge if the parties in the history just related could be subjected to intelligent interrogation. Enough, however, may be discovered in the narrative to render it certain that the dream was merely a revival in consciousness of knowledge that had been long previously forgotten. There was a vague recollection of some such information evidently struggling for recognition; otherwise Mr. R. could not have held the belief in spite of the lack of evidence, that his father had paid the tithes in dispute. He had probably heard from his father some account of a transaction which had taken place so long before that the only surviving actor, the aged lawyer, had forgotten everything about it, and could only recall the event through the associations connected with the Portugal piece of gold. In the lawyer’s case the cerebral register only needed the stimulus afforded by the association of ideas, in order to make it again place before the mind impressions which had long subsided below the level of consciousness. For Mr. R., sleep afforded the limitation of cerebral function needful for a concentration of attention sufficient to penetrate to the level of the residual vibrations which persisted as the sole representatives of the original impressions through which his knowledge of the event had been primitively obtained. Parallel examples are furnished by the cases of individuals who, upon their death-beds, during the dissolution of the brain, have resumed a long disused vocabulary, speaking the language and thinking the thoughts of their childhood. “He ‘babbled of green fields,’” said Mistress Quickly, narrating the closing scenes in the life of the famous Sir John Falstaff. Dr. Rush[72] relates the case of a learned Italian gentleman who, “in the beginning of the yellow fever which terminated his life, ... spoke English only; in the middle of the disease, he spoke French only; but on the day of his death, he spoke only in the language of his native country.” In like manner the old Swedish settlers in Philadelphia who had forgotten their native language, or, at least, had not spoken it for half a century, would pray in Swedish on their death-beds.[73] Sleep and dissolution