This worthy man was named Frantz Mathéus. He inherited from his ancestors the oldest house in the place, an orchard, some arable land on the mountain, a few acres of meadow in the valley; and if you add to this modest patrimony eggs, milk, cheese, and, from time to time, a lean fowl, sent to the Doctor by the honest peasants out of the fulness of their gratitude, you will have the whole of Maître Frantz’s income: it sufficed for his maintenance and that of his old servant Martha, as well as his horse Bruno. Maître Frantz was a curious type of the old _doctores medicinæ_, _theologiæ_ or _philosophiæ_ of the good German school. His face expressed the gentlest placidity, the most perfect good-nature; his ruling passion was metaphysics. The same pleasure which you, I imagine, might take in reading _Candide_ or _The Sentimental Journey_, he experienced in meditating the _Tractatus Theologico-politicus_ of Baruch Spinosa, or the _Monadologie_ of Leibnitz. He also made experiments in physics and chemistry for his own amusement. Having one day put some flour of ergot-rye into a bottle of water, he perceived, at the end of a month or two, that his rye had given birth to a number of little eels, which speedily produced a crowd of others. Mathéus, transported with enthusiasm at this discovery, at once concluded from it that if eels can be made with rye-flour, men may be made with the flour of wheat. But after reflecting more on the subject the learned Doctor thought that this transformation must be effected slowly—progressively; that from rye would come eels—from eels fish of all kinds; from these fishes, reptiles, quadrupeds, birds, and so on, up to man inclusive—the whole by virtue of the law of progress. He called this progression “the ladder of being;” and as he had studied Greek, Latin, and several other languages, he set himself to compose a magnificent work, in sixteen volumes, entitled, _Palingenesis-Psychologico-Anthropo-Zoology_, explaining spontaneous generation, the transformation of bodies, and the peregrination of souls; citing Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Isis and Osiris, Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, Democritus—in short, all the cosmological philosophers, both ancient and modern. He sent several copies of this work to the German universities, and what was more astonishing, a good number of philosophers adopted his system; titles were conferred on him of Corresponding Member of the Surgical Institution of Prague, of the Royal Society of Sciences of Gœttingen, and of Veterinary Councillor of the Stud of Wurtzbourg. Mathéus, encouraged by these tokens of appreciation, resolved to bring out a second edition of his _Palingenesis_, enriched with notes in Hebrew and Syriac in elucidation of the text.