The comparative coarseness of those minds which fabricated the notion of winged men, as celestial messengers, will be the more certainly recognised, if we examine into the pictorial conception which they have permitted, and still allow, to pass, for the embodiment of their idea. Let me, for example, invite the reader to cast his mental eye over the winged men-like bulls, &c., of Assyria and Babylonia; the winged genii of the ancient Egyptians; the winged soul and angel of Death of the Etruscans; the angels of ancient and modern Christian painters; and the pinioned heads which came from the walls to listen to the music of Saint Cecilia--according to Papal legends--and then to try to discover the locality of the muscular organs which are necessary to give movement to the wings. Everybody who has ever carved, at his dinner-table, a grouse, partridge, pheasant, duck, or other fowl, must be aware of the enormous mass of flesh which is associated with the wings. If we bare the breast and remove the pinion bones from any bird which flies--(it is necessary to make this proviso, for such as the dodo, the apteryx, the ostrich, emu, and others, have wings which are only rudimentary, and not used for flight)--we find but a very meagre body remaining behind. Hence we see the necessity of furnishing an imaginary angel which has wings with muscles that will enable the pinions to be used; but in no pictorial representation of an angelic messenger do we ever find the ordinary figure of a man departed from, or any provision made for muscles to move the feathered organs. And we must notice, in passing, that it is monstrous to suppose that a man must become, in part, a bird ere he can be useful to a god!