Sleep and Wakefulness: By Nathaniel Kleitman. (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, and Cambridge University Press, 1939. Pp. 638. Price, 30 s.)

This is another massive production financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. It

has its value as a reference book to the writings on the subject, from the variations in the alpha rhythm to those of the cholesterin content during sleep. This value would have been greater had the author used more discrimination in his selection and above all had he displayed the capacity for summarizing and passing judgement on the data instead of merely leaving them in a catalogued form.

There is a chapter on dreams, largely abstracted from a book by Manacéine published in 1897. It tells us that 'while astrology has long ago given way to astronomy, with respect to dream knowledge and understanding we are not much further advanced than the ancients. In fact, astrology, fortune-telling, crystal-gazing, and dream interpretation are often practised to-day by the same individual.' The author has heard of the term 'psycho-analysis', and says that the Unconscious 'is often thought to determine and influence the dream pattern.'

There is a bibliography of 1, 434 numbers. The only one of them by Freud is an apocryphal book, entitled Dream Psychology—Psychoanalysis for Beginners, 1920, a pirated version of various abstracts from Freud's writings.