The progression of man through the circle of evil is marked by three infelicities: Necessity, oblivion, and deaths. The deaths which follow our changes are so many escapes from their power. Man is a free agent, and has the liberty of choosing; his sufferings and changes cannot be foreseen. By his misconduct he may happen to fall retrograde into the lowest state from which he had emerged. If his conduct in any one state, instead of improving his being, had made it worse, he fell back into a worse condition, to commence again his purifying revolutions. Humanity was the limit of the degraded transmigrations. All the changes above humanity produced felicity. Humanity is the scene of the contest; and after man has traversed every state of animated existence, and can remember all that he has passed through, that consummation follows which he attains in the circle of felicity. It is on this system of transmigration that Taliessin, the Welsh bard, who wrote in the sixth century, gives a recital of his pretended transmigrations. He tells how he had been a serpent, a wild ass, a buck, or a crane, &c.; and this kind of reminiscence of his former state, this recovery of memory, was a proof of the mortal's advances to the happier circle. For to forget what we have been was one of the curses of the circle of evil. Taliessin, therefore, adds Mr. Turner, as profusely boasts of his recovered reminiscence as any modern sectary can do of his state of grace and election. In all these wild reveries there seems to be a moral fable in the notion, that the clearer a man recollects what a _brute_ he has been, it is a certain proof that he is in an improved state! According to the authentic Clavigero, in his history of Mexico, we find the Pythagorean transmigration carried on in the West, and not less fancifully than in the countries of the East. The people of Tlascala believe that the souls of persons of rank went after their death to inhabit the bodies of _beautiful and sweet singing birds_, and those of the _nobler quadrupeds_; while the souls of inferior persons were supposed to pass into _weasels_, _beetles_, and such other _meaner animals_.