XXIV INTRODUCTION. 
transmigration of souls. There can be but little 
doubt that the principles of metempsychosis origin- 
ated from this cause. Nothing could appear to 
them more confirmatory of the doctrine, than that 
an inert aurelia should be again transformed into a 
living body. The only method they had for ac- 
counting for this was, that it had been tenanted by 
the soul of some wretch whose misdeeds on earth 
had merited such a pilgrimage. 
In the institutes of Men, we are told that a priest 
who has drunk wine, shall migrate into a moth or 
fly, and be doomed to feed on ordure ; and that the 
man who steals gold from a priest, shall inhabit a 
thousand times the bodies of spiders. Ifany one steal 
honey, he shall be reborn a great stinging gnat. 
Shakspeare puts the same idea into the words of old 
Christopher Sly, the drunken tinker, in the Induc- 
tion to the Taming of the Shrew. © Am I not old 
Sly’s son, by birth a pedlar, by education a card- 
maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and by pro- 
fession a tinker ?” 
The story of the phenix arising from its own 
ashes, is no doubt of similar origm. ‘The tradition 
is, that it lives five or six hundred years in the 
wilderness, and when thus adyanced in age, builds 
