'Soil his pure ambrosial weeds With the rank vapors of this sin worn mould,' or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness' displayed by some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition of a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we submit, are much too green for any plausible assumption of a foregone training in good or evil. This planet is not their missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil. Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must rather believe they pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity by the fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes and dust of that tramp still sticking to them." The theory of development, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lower stages of rudimentary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesis or speculative toy, is interesting, and not destitute of plausible aspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is found devoid of proof. It is enough here to say that the most authoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, though there is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from the more general to the more specific, yet there is no advance from one type or race to another, no hint that the same individual ever crosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdom to another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward process of natural creation or the stages of life, yet to suppose that the life powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of their bodies, and, in successive crossings of the death gulf, ascend to humanity, is a bare assumption. It befits the delirious lips of Beddoes, who says, "Had I been born a four legg'd child, methinks I might have found the steps from dog to man And crept into his nature. Are there not Those that fall down out of humanity Into the story where the four legg'd dwell?"