We are not informed of the nature of the work which he at this time went abroad to write and publish. From his manuscripts, however, it appears that he was preparing materials and disciplining his mind for his great work, the “Animal Kingdom,” by writing short papers on various physiological subjects. Many of these papers have been translated and published under the title of “Posthumous Tracts.” Leaving Paris in March, 1738, Swedenborg directed his steps toward Italy, and after visiting its principal cities, arrived at Rome on the 25th September. Mr. Rich, in his “Biography of Swedenborg,” remarks,—“This visit should be a memorable one, for it brought the church of the past and the future into a singular communion with each other;—Rome in the still atmosphere and fading light of autumn, with all its trophies of Pagan art, and its hoary traditions; and Swedenborg, the predestined Seer of the last ages, whose eye was just kindling with the light of inspiration. We should lose all faith in the instinctive prescience of the human spirit when great events are at hand, if we might not believe that a presentiment of something in the shadowy distance, connecting his future with the strange mystery of the city, did not cross, for a moment, the mind of Swedenborg, when he entered the once holy and revered metropolis of the faith.” After a sojourn of five months, Swedenborg left Rome on the 15th of February, 1739, varying his homeward route. His journal from the 17th of March, 1739, when he was at Genoa, is a blank, and his after wanderings we can only conjecture. “It is most probable,” says Wilkinson, “that he deposited the manuscript of the “Economy of the Animal Kingdom,” at Amsterdam, on his way from Leipsic to Sweden, in 1740; that he lived in his own country from 1740 or 1741 till 1744, and in the latter year went again to Holland, and from thence came to England, where we meet him in 1745.” In 1740-41, Swedenborg published at Amsterdam his “Economy of the Animal Kingdom;” and in 1744-45, the “Animal Kingdom,” Parts I. and II. at the Hague, and Part III. in London. CHAPTER VI. _The “Economy of the Animal Kingdom,” and the “Animal Kingdom.”_