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ter on the anniversary of the Mahomedan festival, when so many 
of those animals are devoted to destruction. 
The doctrine of the metempsychosis is commonly supposed to 
be the cause of founding this singular hospital; 1, however, con- 
versed with several sensible brahmins on the subject, who rather 
ascribed it to a motive of benevolence for the animal crea- 
tion: nor can we do otherwise than approve of that part of the 
institution appropriated for the comfort of those valuable creatures 
who have exhausted their strength in the service of man. At the 
same time it must be acknowledged, that the belief in transmigra- 
tion which pervades every part of the Hindoo system, has probably 
no small degree of influence in this endowment: for the metem- 
psychosis is founded nearly on the same principle with that of 
Pythagoras, and the ancient philosophers, as we find from Ovid. 
“ That all things are but alter’d, nothing dies, 
(c And here and there, th’ unbodied spirit dies, 
“ By time, or force, or sickness dispossess’d, 
“ And lodges where it lights, in bird or beast ; 
Or hunts without, ’till ready limbs it find, 
“ And actuates those according to their kind: 
“ From tenement to tenement is toss’d, 
C( The soul is still the same, the figure only lost ! 
“ Then let not piety be put to flight, 
“ To please the taste of glutton-appetite; 
“ But suffer inmate souls secure to dwell, 
“ Lest from their seats your parents you expel ! 
“ With rabid hunger feed upon your kind, 
“ Or from a beast dislodge a brother’s mind.’’ Dryden. 
The inhabitants of Surat are generally merchants or manufac- 
turers: after the Mahrattas conquered Guzerat, the weavers of 
2 L 
