THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL. 13 



animals to have sprung from earth, they 

 must have done so in one of two ways 

 either they crawled out as worms, or they 

 came out as eggs" 



PLATO, the most celebrated of all the 

 Grecian philosophers, represents Socrates, 

 the wisest of the wise, as advocating the 

 Transmutation theory to its fullest extent, 

 by supposing that the wicked, after their 

 penal wanderings of 10,000 years in the 

 world of spirits, would again return to 

 earth, and be " turned into asses and 

 brutes of that kind ; " while the souls of 

 the good would " again migrate into a 

 corresponding peaceable kind of animal, 

 such as bees or wasps, or ants, or even into 

 the same species again, and from these 

 become moderate men" * 



But it is in another work where Plato's 

 talent shines out so brightly, in the de- 

 scription which he gives in his Banquet, 

 or Treatise on Love, of the origin of the 

 human race, and which is deserving of 



* Plato's Phcedo, 70. Herodotus only allows 

 3000 years as the limit of the Transmigration period. 



