may be gleaned from the Vedas, there is an inherent probability against the early Aryans, any more than the modern Hindu, believing that the soul of man or beast comes suddenly to a full stop. To destroy spirit seems to the Asiatic mind as impossible as to destroy matter seems to the biologist. Leaving the Vedas and coming down to the Sutras and Upanishads, we discover the transmigration of souls at first suggested and then clearly defined. Whence came it? Was it the belief of those less civilised nations whom the Aryans conquered, and did they, in accepting it from them, give it a moral complexion by investing it with the highly ethical significance of an upward or downward progress occasioned by the merits or demerits of the soul in a previous state of being? A large portion of mankind finds it as difficult to conceive a sudden beginning as a sudden end of spirit. We forget difficulties which we are not in the habit of facing; those who have tried to face this one have generally stumbled over it. Even Dante with his subtle psychophysiological reasoning hardly persuades. The ramifications of a life before stretched far: “Whosoever believes in the fabled prior existence of souls, let him be anathema,” thundered the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 543. Which shows that many Christians shared Origen’s views on this subject. From the moment that soul-wandering became, in India, a well-established doctrine, some three thousand years ago, the conception of the status of animals was perfectly clear. “Wise people,” says the Bhagavad Gita, “see the same soul (Atman) in the Brahman, in worms and insects, in the outcasts, in the dog and the elephant, in beasts, cows, gadflies, and gnats.” Here we have the doctrine succinctly expounded, and in spite of subtleties introduced by later philosophers (such as that of the outstanding self) the exposition holds good to this day as a statement of the faith of India. It also described the doctrine of Pythagoras, which ancient traditions asserted that he brought from Egypt, where no such doctrine ever existed. Pythagoras is still commonly supposed to have borrowed from Egypt; but it is strange that a single person should continue to hold an opinion against which so much evidence has been produced; especially as it is surely very easy to explain the tradition by interpreting Egypt to have stood for “the East” in common parlance, exactly as in Europe a tribe of low caste Indians came to be called gypsies or Egyptians. Pythagoras believed that he had been one of the Trojan heroes, whose shield he knew at a glance in the Temple of Juno where it was hung up. After him, Empedocles thought that he had passed through many forms, amongst others those of a bird and a fish. Pythagoras and his fire-spent disciple belong to times which seem almost near if judged by Indian computations: yet they are nebulous figures; they seem to us, and perhaps they seemed to men who lived soon after