The reflection that I possessed the power (already thrice successfully exercised) to transfer my spirit, whenever I willed it, from one man's body to another, and so get rid of any afflictions that might beset me, was highly agreeable, and, under the present circumstances, consolatory. But there was one drawback to my satisfaction; and that was a discovery which I now made, that men's bodies were not to be had every day, at a moment's warning. This was the more provoking, as I knew there was no lack of them in the world, between eighty and ninety thousand men, women, and children having given up the ghost in the natural way that very day, whose corses would be on the morrow consigned to miserable holes in the earth, where they could and would be of no service to any person or persons whatever, the young doctors only excepted. And here I cannot help observing, that it is an extremely absurd practice thus to dispose of--to squander and throw away, as I may call it--the hosts of human bodies that are annually falling dead upon our hands; whereas, with the least management in the world, they might be converted into objects of great usefulness and value. According to the computation of philosophers, the population of the world may be reckoned in round numbers at just one thousand millions; of which number the annual mortality, at the low rate of three in a hundred, is thirty millions--and that without counting the extra million or two knocked on the head in the wars. Let us see what benefit might be derived from a judicious disposition of this mountain of mortality--I say mountain, for it is plain such a number of bodies heaped together would make a Chimborazo. The great mass of mankind might be made to subserve the purpose for which nature designed them, namely--to enrich the soil from which they draw their sustenance. According to the economical Chinese method, each of these bodies could be converted into five tons of excellent manure; and the whole number would therefore produce just one hundred and fifty millions of tons; of which one hundred and fifty thousand, being their due proportion, would fall to the share of the United States of America, enabling our farmers, in the course of ten or twelve years, to double the value of their lands. This, therefore, would be a highly profitable way of disposing of the mass of mankind. Such a disposition of their bodies would prove especially advantageous among American cultivators in divers districts, as a remedy against bad agriculture, and as the only means of handing down their fields in good order to their descendants. Such a disposition of bodies should be made upon every field of victory, so that dead heroes might be made to repair some of the mischiefs inflicted by live ones. The English farmers, it is well known, made good use of the bones left on the field of Waterloo; and though they would have done much better had they carried off the