SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XI. No. 281. 



" Eeincarnation thus once established as 

 a fact, it is easy by a little further hypoth- 

 esis to trace the progress of individual souls 

 in their flight through history, as well as the 

 telepathic influences which other great souls 

 born and unborn have upon them. Their 

 victories and reverses are open to our eyes, 

 and from these the laws of soul-growth each 

 initiate may establish for himself. 



" By the finest Sciosophic studies, the au- 

 thor of ' How Souls are Educated' has 

 traced the ego of Alexander the Great from, 

 its first incarnation in the wilds of Crim 

 Tartary, to ' the Jewish hermit adept called 

 Jesus,' thence to Alexander, Alaric, Charle- 

 magne, Edward the Black Prince, Henry 

 VIII., a Cornish fisherman, an African 

 king, a Staten Island carpenter, a Harvard 

 senior, an explorer in the Persian Alps, his 

 soul-ripening being finally complete as ' Old 

 Mountain Phelps the hermit guide of the 

 Adirondack Forest'; thirtj' incarnations in 

 all from crudity to perfection.* ' But one 

 more necessary experience,' it has been 

 shown, ' awaits his soul — that of woman- 

 hood.' 



"It is easy to demonstrate through 

 these strange changes that up to a certain 

 point souls develop as wild vegetation 

 does by the action of laws external and 

 internal and their own inherent instincts. 

 Then as a gardener takes a wild-crab 

 tree, prunes, cultivates, trains, nourishes, 

 plants its seed in diflerent soils, until he 

 has a fine fruit good for human use, so 

 the gods take a soul, train and prune it 

 until it is fit to nourish by example and pre- 

 cept the souls of other men and to pass by 

 our earth. The soul of Alexander the 

 Great, on leaving the body of Henry VIII., 

 passed under the immediate care of the gods, 

 and the fourth phase of its existence began, 

 the phase of purification, for as a fruit may 

 rot because of too much sunshine, so may a 

 soul, and all rot must be purged awaj'. 



* 'Education of Souls,' 1893, p. 17. 



' ' Another ego, whose gyrations have been 

 traced and placed on record, begins the 

 soul life as a woman, the savage wife of a 

 savage. She dies in the forest ; reborn she 

 dies in the slums ; then in a convent ; then 

 at the stake, one of the martyred Waldenses; 

 then a grand lady slain in a feudal castle. 

 She is reborn as St. Elizabeth of Hungary 

 and again as a great lady who is by no 

 means a saint; next she is Milton's daughter, 

 Dorothy ; and to-day she is alive and within 

 the United States, perhaps indeed the very 

 reader of these pages undergoing the pangs 

 of her final transformation. 



" ' The companion-soul of St. Elizabeth ' 

 says the gifted author above quoted, ' was 

 the husband of her first two incarnations, 

 in the latter of which she abandoned his 

 children before his body was cold. In the 

 third she did not meet his soul until after 

 she had begun her infamous life. "When 

 they did meet, his efforts to save her were 

 pathetic but unavailing. In the fourth he 

 was her father, the gardener, and it was his 

 love for her that drew her to his house, a 

 better place than she deserved or could 

 have entered but for his love. In the fifth 

 he was the pastor of the church to which 

 she belonged, and it was his teaching that 

 gave her courage to die. In the sixth he 

 was the baron, in the seventh the king, in 

 the eight the lord to whose death she was a 

 party and whose children she threw into 

 the river. Thus far this soul, although it 

 has had hundreds of incarnations and a 

 wide range of experiences, has watched over 

 the soul of St. Elizabeth and tried to help 

 her in nine of her ten incarnations.' " 



' ' The soul of William of Orange, it has 

 been discovered, is ' now in the body of 

 a boy 4 years old (in 1893) in the state 

 of Connecticut,' while ' Richard, the Lion- 

 hearted, is a little boot-black in New York 

 City.' 



" ' Each world in the great belt has a soul 

 and between the smallest moon and the 



