In Calabria, Italy, when a butterfly flits around a baby's cradle, it is believed to be either an angel or a baby's soul, and a like belief prevails in other parts of the world; and we have the classic personification of Psyche, the soul, as a butterfly. Among the uneducated peasantry of Ireland, the pure white butterfly is thought to be the soul of the sinless and forgiven dead on the way to Paradise, whilst the spotted ones are the embodiments of spirits condemned to spend their time of purgatory upon earth, the number of the sins corresponding with the number of spots on the wings of the insect (418. 192). In early Christian art and folk-lore, the soul is often figured as a dove, and in some heathen mythologies of Europe as a mouse, weasel, lizard, etc. In various parts of the world we find that children, at death, go to special limbos, purgatories, or heavens, and the folk-lore of the subject must be read at length in the mythological treatises. The Andaman Islanders "believe that every child which is conceived has had a prior existence, but only as an infant. If a woman who has lost a baby is again about to become a mother, the name borne by the deceased is bestowed on the fetus, in the expectation that it will prove to be the same child born again. Should it be found at birth that the babe is of the same sex as the one who died, the identity is considered to be sufficiently established; but, if otherwise, the deceased one is said to be under the ràu- (_Ficus laccifera_), in _châ-itân-_ (Hades)." Under this tree, upon the fruit of which they live, also dwell "the spirits and souls of all children who die before they cease to be entirely dependent on their parents (_i.e._ under six years of age)" (498. 86, 93). There was a somewhat similar myth in Venezuela (448. 297). Mr. Codrington gives some interesting illustrations of this belief from Melanesia (25. 311):-- "In the island of Aurora, Maewo, in the New Hebrides, women sometimes have a notion that the origin, beginning, of one of their children is a cocoanut or a bread-fruit, or something of that kind; and they believe, therefore, that it would be injurious to the child to eat that food. It is a fancy of the woman, before the birth of the child, that the infant will be the _nunu_, which may be translated the echo, of such an object. Women also fancy that a child is the _nunu_ of some dead person. It is not a notion of metempsychosis, as if the soul of the dead person returned in the new-born child; but it is thought that there is so close a connection that the infant takes the place of the deceased. At Mota, also, in the Banks Islands, there was the belief that each person had a source of his being, his origin, in some animate or inanimate thing, which might, under some circumstances, become known to him." As Mr. Codrington suggests, such beliefs throw light upon the probable origin of totemism and its development. _Spirit-World_.