Swedenborg’s father was a Swedish Lutheran Bishop with leanings towards pietism, and a rather broader and more sympathetic outlook than the majority of his fellow clergy. His name, Swedborg, was subsequently changed to Swedenborg when the family was ennobled by the Swedish king. Emanuel was the second son and third child of Bishop Swedborg and his wife, Anna, of whom we know but little, and who died when Emanuel was only eight years old. The child was thus surrounded by religious influences in his early days, and it is said that his father had a guardian angel with whom he claimed to be able to hold converse on occasion. Reared under these conditions, he naturally enough evinced strongly religious tendencies in his childhood. “From my fourth to my tenth year,” he says, “I was constantly engaged in thought upon God, salvation, and the spiritual experiences of men. I revealed things at which my father and mother wondered, saying that angels must be speaking through me.” Here at least we obtain some suggestion of what he eventually became, and of which the intervening years between childhood and middle age seem to afford us little or no hint. The believer in heredity will point to the psychic temperament of the father as inherited by the son; but there appears to be no foreshadowing in his ancestry of that encyclopædic mind with which he was destined to astonish his contemporaries. His father evidently failed to understand his precocious son, and the relations between the two were far from cordial, the son considering that his father was inappreciative and failed to encourage his intellectual activities, and also blaming him for meanness in matters of finance. Bishop Swedborg had, however, eight other children besides Emanuel, and very probably he did not find it easy to make two ends meet, especially as he was something of an author himself, and published books at his own expense, which proved far from remunerative. Probably the father considered that the son ought to settle down to some regular trade or profession instead of commencing life by travelling in search of knowledge first to one country and then to another. Presumably he regarded his precocious offspring as likely to become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and there are doubtless many other parents who, under similar circumstances, would have thought the same. In any case the son was able to start off on his travels in spite of financial embarrassments and many dangers on the way. He was nearly wrecked when approaching England. Then the ship was boarded by pirates, and on the top of this was fired into by a British guardship, being mistaken for the pirate craft. Finally, our youthful hero narrowly escaped hanging for breaking the quarantine regulations, the plague at this time being prevalent in Sweden. Under somewhat similar circumstances the great Julius told the captain of his vessel not to be afraid, as he was carrying Cæsar. Whether Swedenborg had any such faith