80 Notices of Books. [January, 
Sociology; the fifth a treatise on Dialegmatics, or Biological 
Methods, in parallel with mathematics, as a science of method. 
In treating of Spiritual Genealogy under the principal division of 
Spiritual Biology, the author speculates—‘ Palzontology testifies 
that inferior types of animal organisms have preceded superior 
types in their first appearance on earth, and therefore the latter 
must either have started into life at once, without progenitors, or 
come into this world by the procreative co-operation of inferior 
types. We suppose the latterto be not impossible, although no 
instance of such a fact has been recorded in history during the 
last 6000 years; and natural selection with hereditary transmission 
mark such very small degrees of variation within known limits that 
we cannot give it credit for the real origin of species. The possible 
incarnation of superior types by nearly related inferior progenitors 
is, then, a rational mode of accounting for the terrestrial origin 
and metamorphic evolution of individuals and species. Pre- 
existence may account for both the rise and fall of mankind on 
earth, as well as for the appearance, development, decline, and 
final disappearance of any collective realm or species of animal 
or vegetable organism, and thus ultramundane origin is not less 
important than mundane genealogy in problems of spiritual 
evolution. If uncultured and indocile races of spirits were in- 
carnated on a large scale during many generations in the families 
of a highly cultivated and morally refined nation, such a process 
would eventually bring the nation down to barbarism and ruin. 
New revelations and religions may disorganise old nationalities, 
and re-construct them on new foundations of laws and doctrines, 
as history shows in all past ages; and in either case ultramundane 
causes, in the shape of extraneous incarnations or spiritual 
revelations, produce the mundane effects of social and religious 
evolutions and revolutions. These are problems of collective 
biology which we shall have to deal with again, when questions 
of sociogenesis will suggest those of realmogenesis, still more 
puzzling and complex; for although we may account for the 
spiritual conservation and progressive evolution of extinct races 
of mankind by successive incarnations in superior races living 
on the earth, we cannot easily conceive the transformation of 
lost paleontological types of animal organism and instinct by 
successive incarnations, since this would not be heterogenetic 
evolution in outward form alone, but also in organic constitution; 
a problem of ultramundane as well as of mundane evolution. 
The Darwinian theory would account for all kinds of creation 
by mundane variations transmitted to posterity, but that ignores all 
worlds of life beyond the natural and the lymbic, and pre-supposes 
the destruction of souls as well as bodies at the death of in- 
dividuals. P 5 : Incarnation means the descent of 
immortal spirit into a mortal body by the process of embryo- 
genesis. Resurrection means the rising of immortal spirit 
from the mortal body. This is not the vulgar notion of the 
