TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 291 



fishes, t: lias but little or brief residence among them ; for 

 even when absorbed by the larger ones for nutriment, they are 

 swallowed without laceration, and entombed in darkness and 

 death before they are well conscious of their change of situa- 

 tion. Death, therefore, is to them what the Druids in their 

 mythological theories sang it to be to man, 



A change which can but for a moment last, 

 A point between the future and the past." 



By the same writer it is added, in a note, that the Jewish 

 Rabbins estimated so highly the general comfort of fish exist- 

 ence, that one of them, in describing their doctrine of the 

 transmigration of souls, inculcates that those of the righteous 

 whose conversation is with the Lord, and who only need a 

 purification, go into fish. This, and other like wild imagina- 

 tions, may have originated partly in the desire to account for, 

 and reconcile with our ideas of justice, the suffering, in any 

 sort, of the harmless tribes, in consequence of their furnishing 

 support to the carnivorous. The deaths of the former by 

 violence, instead of being viewed as a condition of their being, 

 have been sometimes regarded in the light of punishment, and 

 since such could not be inflicted justly on other than a respon- 

 sible agent, the forms of brutes have been assigned to human 

 spirits in a state of penalty or purgation. Others have gone 

 further, and adopted from the Jesuit, Father Bougeaut, a 

 notion that all animals, save the human, are animated by evil 

 spirits or devils, thus retained, till the general judgment, in 

 VOL. L 18. 



