Here might be the place for enquiring how far the Doctor's opinions or fancies upon this mysterious subject were original. His _notion_ he used to call it; but a person to whom the reader will be introduced ere long, and who regarded him with the highest admiration and the profoundest respect, always spoke of it as the Columbian Theory of Progressive Existence. Original indeed in the Doctor it was not; he said that he had learned it from his poor Uncle William; but that William Dove originated it himself there can be little doubt. From books it was impossible that he should have derived it, because he could not read; and nothing can be more unlikely than that he should have met with it as a traditional opinion. The Doctor believed that this poor Uncle, of whom he never spoke without some expression of compassionate kindness, had deduced it intuitively as an inference from his instinctive skill in physiognomy. When subjects like these are treated of, it should be done discreetly. There should be, in the words of Bishop Andrewes, “_Οἰκονομία_, a dispensation, not a dissipation; a laying forth, not _διασκορπισμος_, a casting away; a wary sowing, not a heedless scattering; and a sowing _χεὶρι, οὐ θυλακῃ_, by handfulls, not by basket-fulls, as the heathen-man well said.” Bearing this in mind I have given a Chapterfull, not a Volumefull, and that Chapter is for physiologists and philosophers; but this Opus is not intended for them alone; they constitute but a part only of that “fit audience” and not “few,” which it will find. One Andrew Henderson, a Scotchman, who kept a bookseller's shop, or stand, in Westminster Hall, at a time when lawyers' tongues and witnesses' souls were not the only commodities exposed for sale there, published a tragedy, called “Arsinoe, or The Incestuous Marriage.” The story was Egyptian; but the drama deserves to be called Hendersonian, after its incomparable author; for he assured the reader, in a prefatory advertisement, that there were to be found in it “the most convincing arguments against incest and self-murder, interspersed with an inestimable treasure of ancient and modern learning, and the substance of the principles of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton, adapted to the meanest capacity, and very entertaining to the Ladies, containing a nice description of the passions and behaviour of the Fair Sex.”