62 RABBINICAL FANCIES. 



an observant naturalist, one who waged war, moreover, with 

 Popular Fallacies, imagined that Oak-apples and other Galls 

 were animated, nay, brought into being by a soul not an 

 animal but a vegetative and sensitive soul in the plant itself. 

 To account for the mysterious entrance of life into the centre 

 of an imperf orate ball, he might just as well have adopted, and 

 slightly modified to suit his purpose, the no less imaginative 

 notion of some learned Jewish Rabbins, who believed, or, not 

 believing, taught that human souls transmigrate after death 

 into leaves and buds. "For certain crimes," they would have 

 it, " a soul goes into the leaf of a tree ; the wind then rises, 

 and shaking it about causes great torment. This punishment 

 ceases when the leaf falls to the ground : though sometimes, 

 indeed, such a soul passes from leaf to leaf through several." 



Before we tlirow these learned bubbles entirely away, 

 suppose we, in sport, toss up the last of them, just to 

 make with it another random hit at the origin of life in the 

 oak-apple. Let us fancy, with the sagacious Rabbins, an 

 erring soul incarcerate within a single leaf, or wandering from 

 one green prison to another. A portion of its guilt thus ex- 

 piated, we may imagine it in remittance of punishment, and, as 

 a first step towards restoration, permitted to tlirow aside its 

 mere vegetable skin, and to put on an animal form (albeit one 

 of the very lowest), as the grub, or even egg of a gall-nut 

 insect. Under a transition so important as the recovery of an 

 animal shape, however insignificant, coidd a poor sold do other- 



