But if you would have something more extraordinary, more worthy of the observation of philosophers, observe the snail, which lives one and two whole months after its head is cut off, and which afterwards has a second head, containing all the organs possessed by the first. This truth, to which all children can be witnesses, is more worthy than the illusion of polypi of soft water. What becomes of its sensorium, its magazine of ideas, and soul, when its head is cut off? How do all these return? A soul which is renewed is a very curious phenomenon; not that it is more strange than a soul begotten, a soul which sleeps and awakes, or a condemned soul. POLYTHEISM. The plurality of gods is the great reproach at present cast upon the Greeks and Romans: but let any man show me, if he can, a single fact in the whole of their histories, or a single word in the whole of their books, from which it may be fairly inferred that they believed in many supreme gods; and if neither that fact nor word can be found, if, on the contrary, all antiquity is full of monuments and records which attest one sovereign God, superior to all other gods, let us candidly admit that we have judged the ancients as harshly as we too often judge our contemporaries. We read in numberless passages that Zeus, Jupiter, is the master of gods and men. "_Jovis omnia plena._"--"All things are full of Jupiter." And St. Paul gives this testimony in favor of the ancients: "_In ipso vivimus, movemur, et sumus, ut quidam vestrorum poetarum dixit._"--"In God we live, and move, and have our being, as one of your own poets has said." After such an acknowledgment as this, how can we dare to accuse our instructors of not having recognized a supreme God? We have no occasion whatever to examine upon this subject, whether there was formerly a Jupiter who was king of Crete, and who may possibly have been considered and ranked as a god; or whether the Egyptians had twelve superior gods, or eight, among whom the deity called Jupiter by the Latins might be one. The single point to be investigated and ascertained here is, whether the Greeks and Romans acknowledged one celestial being as the master or sovereign of other celestial beings. They constantly tell us that they do; and we ought therefore to believe them. The admirable letter of the philosopher Maximus of Madaura to St. Augustine is completely to our purpose: "There is a God," says he, "without any beginning, the common Father of all, but who never produced a being like Himself. What man is so stupid and besotted as to doubt it?" Such is the testimony of a pagan of the fourth century on behalf of all antiquity.