Copy 1, Volume 1

Episodes of insect life / By Acheta Domestica, M.E.S. [i.e. L.M. Budgen].

  • Budgen, L. M., Miss.
Date:
1849-1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Episodes of insect life / By Acheta Domestica, M.E.S. [i.e. L.M. Budgen]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ee TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 29] fishes, “has but little or brief residence among them; for even when absorbed by the larger ones for nutriment, they are death before they are well conscious of their change of situa- tion. Death, therefore, is to them what the Druids in their mythological theories sang it to be to man, | | A change which can but for a moment last, A point between the future and the past.” By the same writer it is added, in a note, that the Jewish Rabbins estimated so highly the general comfort of fish exist- ence, that one of them, in describing their doctrine of the transmigration of souls, inculcates that those of the righteous whose conversation is with the Lord, and who only necd a purification, go into fish. This, and other like wild imagina- tions, may have originated partly in the desire to account for, and reconcile with our ideas of justice, the suffering, in any sort, of the harmless tribes, in consequence of their furnishing support to the carnivorous. The deaths of the former by violence, instead of being viewed as a condition of their being, have been sometimes regarded in the light of punishment, and since such could not be inflicted justly on oteer than a respon- sible agent, the forms of brutes have been assigned to human spirits in a state of penalty or purgation. Others have gone further, and adopted from the Jesuit, Father Bougeaut, a notion that all animals, save the human, are animated by evil spirits or devils,—thus retained, till the general judgment, in I g 2