second book of Esdras, who is evidently under Babylonian influences, that the world reverts to an archaic state of silence and lifelessness between period and period of life.

To each of these Eonic periods a divine messenger is ascribed, and each messenger seems in a sense to be regarded as identical with the others, just as John the Baptist was regarded as a re-appearance of Elijah. The key to this is that each supernal man is regarded as but the missionary manifestation of the One Supreme Being; and the idea, if pantheistic in excess, is not altogether an unworthy one. We have alluded to the Principle of Evil in the Zoroastrian creed. There he appears personified as Aharman (Anrô-mainyus), but his existence is only permitted for a limited period by Ahura Masda (Hôrmezd), the Creator of all Good. The sway of the Evil One extends only over the mortal life. In one of the oldest Gathas, or original hymns of the Avesta, some of which are considered to date from the veritable time of the Prophet, we find "Let not the mischiefmaker destroy the second life;" meaning, according to the Parsi commentators, that in the second period his power to destroy ceases. This faith is more fully developed in expression in the Desatir, where we find: "Amongst the most resplendent, powerful, and glorious of the servants who are free from inferior bodies and matter, there is none God's enemy or rival, or disobedient, or cast down, or annihilated."

It is necessary to understand something of this before turning to the completion of the myth of Kaiômart. And it may be well to convey more distinctly the basis of the Parsi doctrines. They are

founded on the ancient conception of Parô-asti, or pre-existence. "The parô-asti is not the life in the other world, as we understand it, but it signifies the primary state of the soul, to which it returns after its separation from the body; this state is then identified with that of everlasting life.* In the Dabistan the same belief is found, without which, it may be named, it is impossible to understand the Kabbalah, Buddhism, the doctrines of Pythagoras, and certain sayings even of the Pharisees of the time when our era begins. The noblest modern expression of the doctrine may be found in Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood." The Persian faith is that souls are eternal and limitless, that they proceed from above, and are spirits of the upper sphere. Those who are imperfectly developed migrate from one body to another, until by the efficacy of good thoughts, good words, and good actions, they are fully and finally emancipated from the corporeal condition, and gain their higher rank. They are also, according to the quality of their good works, more or less in affinity with a particular star, and belong to the sphere assigned to that star.

The regaining of this primitive state with all the added gains of mortal experience, may well be deemed as difficult a process as that of birth as we know it. The resurrection is regarded as the great deed; in a very old part of the Avesta it is designated "the greatest business." As the crowing of the cock awakes us and convinces us that what we saw in sleep was but a dream, so in like manner after death we shall realise that the corporeal world itself was but a dream that is passed away. The

cock is with the Parsis the resurrection symbol.

In this difficult business of revival man is not without a helper. There is Sosiosh (Saoshyâs) the kindler, the victorious, the uplifted amid the corporeal. "He is so helpful that he will save the whole

corporeal world; he is so high amongst the corporeal, that he, endowed with body and vital powers, will withstand the destroyer of the corporeal." He has a double attribute, probably owing to modifications of doctrine by lapse of time. He is a prophet appearing before the close of a millenium to rearrange the world, and prepare for the resurrection. He is the victorious dead-restorer, who raises the dead or causes the resurrection by means of the power and assistance of wisdom.* In the former sense he is a successor to Kaiômart; in the later he would seem to be almost identical with him in function.

As the millennium draws near, the force of nature weakens. Men will pass three days and nights in

adoration to the Supreme.

As

they began to corporealise themselves by feeding first upon water, and in succession upon fruit, milk, and flesh, so now they will reverse the process. They will cease to take flesh, then milk, then fruit, and finally will drink water only. Then will appear the Helper, and man will feed no more, and yet he will not die.

The account of the process of resurrection we must leave for a succeeding paper, as also sundry parallelisms to be shown between the Aryan tradition and that most familiar to ourselves.

Our Aryan progenitor would appear to be rather a spectral being, but if we follow the creed of our Zoroastrian cousins, that on awakening from the sleep of heedlessness, we shall recognise that the earth life has been but an instructive dream, we ourselves, being yet. within that dream, must now appear even more shadowy still before that reverend ancestor who so long ago rubbed away the heavy mist from his eyes.

THAT strange perversity of the human understanding, by which the most absurd and monstrous dogmas, religious and other, have been unhesitatingly received, while a belief in the general habitability of the universe, a belief agreeable to reason as well as to analogy, has been scouted as at best an idle fancy, is not the least curious of phenomena in the history of specuÎation.

In antiquity, the Greek philosophy, which was not bound by any particular religious creeds, regarded the question much more independently than was possible in later Christian times. The Greeks, however, seldom ventured to speculate beyond the Moon. For the sort of arguments which may be supposed to have been current in the second century, on both sides, we are indebted to the author of the "Parallel Lives," by his treatise "On the Face which appears in the Moon." Lactantius (tutor to the sons of Constantine), as champion of the orthodox faith, with a special reference, no doubt, to Plutarch, ridicules those of the pagan theorists who ventured to indulge in such speculation, and demands, with some reason, why they don't go a little further, and people the Sun as well as the Moon. "Why not?" asks the bishop. "What would it cost you when you have gone so far? But I suppose you were afraid they [the solar people] would be burned to cinders, and the mischief might be laid at your doors." What the

Christian father treats with so much scorn has been affirmed in our day by no less authorities than the elder Herschel and Arago.

At the establishment of Christianity, to deny the Earth to be the sole habitat of rational, or indeed of any sort of existences, was naturally a highly heretical and anti-Biblical proposition; and during the medieval ages orthodoxy on this point was pretty well undisturbed. Down to the middle of the seventeenth century the subject was abandoned for the most part to the romancists, or if it was referred to at all by the learned, it was only with the purpose of covering it with ridicule. Even the philosophic Lucian had classed those who assigned inhabitants to the Moon amongst the wildest dreamers, although in his "True History" (the original and entertaining source of the modern comic romance, and written in ridicule of the travellers' tales of the day) he is at the pains of inventing some beings of very mongrel breeds for both the Sun and Moon. In this, the first romance connected with the plurality of worlds, the author pretends, while on a voyage of discovery into the Western Ocean, to have been whirled upwards, with his ship and companions, into the celestial regions. They are landed upon the Moon, and there find the Selenites on the point of setting out on a campaign against their enemies the Heliots-the people of the sun, the casus belli being the opposition of the latter to the

Selenite colonisation of the Morning Star. The earth-born adventurers are invited to join in the expedition. The Selenite allies are of the most heterogeneous and nondescript species that could well be imagined, e.g., the Psyllotoxota (flea-archers, each magnificent steed being equal in size to a dozen elephants) and the Anemodromi, who, instead of wings, use their long robes, which they tuck up and make into sails. By means of web bridges, constructed by enormous spiders, one spider having the bulk of all the Cyclades put together, they cross over into the enemy's territory. It must be enough to state that the Selenites, at first victorious, suffer a terrible reverse; and a treaty, with the most exact stipulations, is concluded between the contending powers.

As for the nature of the Selenites, they have at least one or two little advantages, as compared with us, although they are only our satellites. When the inevitable hour of dissolution arrives, the Selenite has not to submit to the trying ordeal of death: he simply dissolves into particles of air in which he mixes, as it were, like smoke. Of that element his beverage is composed, which, strained through a vessel, becomes a sort of dew. Their stomachs open and shut at pleasure, and serve them for convenient sacks; and, as they are not incommoded with all the gross internal apparatus of the terrestrial stomach, they use them, like the Marsupials, as a vehicle and protection for their children. Their eyes are made to take out, which, as Lucian justly remarks, is an excellent way of preserving their sight; and there are many so considerate as never to place an eye in its socket, unless there is any.

thing really worth looking at. Such as chance to lose their own, borrow eyes from a neighbour. So much for the natives of our satellite. Between the Pleiades and Hyades, Lucian afterwards arrives at a city called Lychnopolis, where nothing in the way of life but ambulatory lamps are visible-all hurrying from place to place. These highly-illuminated people are for the most part very diminutive beings, but some are very bright and shining lights. By a favourable change in the wind, Lucian is at length able to descend upon the terrestrial seas, where, we may just state, he and his companions are swallowed, ship and all, by an enormous whale capable of holding 10,000 inhabitants, besides hills, forests, &c. After a few astonishing adventures, our involuntary colonists escape from their cetacean prison by setting fire to the interior and hoisting sail, first taking the precaution of propping up the huge jaws of the whale to secure their exit. Of their experiences in the Islands of the Blessed, the meeting with Homer and with Helen (who maintains in those regions her character for levity by running away from her heroic husband again) and the Onosceleæ, seductive ladies of the Sea, highly interesting as they are, we have no space here to repeat the history.*

of Plutarch; but, possibly as much from timidity as from want of conviction, he employs in the dialogue the doubtful medium of a Lapland witch. For much the same reason it was that the speculative minds of that age chose to display their opinions on the subject in the disguise of romance, half serious and half comic. The best known and most clever is that of Cyrano Bergerac, under the title of "Histoire Comique des Etats et des Empires de la Lune;" which was followed by his "Les Etats et les Empires du Soleil." They bear evident traces of their origin from the "True History ;" and, as the celebrated Greek writer's purpose was to ridicule the absurd fictions of historians and travellers, such as those of Ctesias and Pliny, that of Bergerac was chiefly to satirize the pedantry and deference to authority prevalent in the 17th century. The "Histoire Comique," we may add, has a special interest for us, as one of the originals of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels.'

Lucian's Icaro - Menippus ascends to the Moon by the simple addition to his person of an eagle's and a vulture's wing. Bergerac contrives a special elastic machine in which, after long travelling between the two globes, he at length arrives upon our satellite by getting within the sphere of its attraction. He soon falls in with some of the inhabitants, who are huge men twelve cubits high, and walk on all fours. They take him to be some curious and strange animal, and determine to exhibit him for show. In the course of his wanderings in this condition he is astonished one day by hearing the voice of a person speaking in the Greek language. This individual is a native of the Sun, which, to relieve a surplus population, occasionally sends out colonies; and it had fallen to his

lot to migrate to our Earth. But he afterwards preferred the Moon as a residence; "for men are there lovers of truth- one sees no pedants there; the philosophers allow themselves to be persuaded by reason alone; the authority of a savan or of the greater number has no advantage, on a question of opinion, over a thresher of corn when he reasons as strongly There are the Vulgar here as there, who cannot endure thought upon those subjects to which they are not accustomed. But know that they treat you on equal terms, and that if anyone from this Earth had ascended into yours having the hardihood to call himself a man, your savans would have caused him to be suffocated as a monster."

Bergerac finds himself regarded as a species of monkey. That he comes to be classified with the Simian tribe arose from the following circumstance. A Spaniard of the name of Gonzales (who had written on the same subject as Bergerac) had previously reached the Lunarians, and upon his arrival had at once been set down in the monkey class from his wearing the Spanish dress, &c., which the people. had decided was the proper fashion for their monkeys, as the most ridiculous which, after long meditation, they had found it possible to devise. As the new arrival is dressed in a somewhat different style, they jump to the conclusion that he is the female of the same species; and in consequence they are shut up together by the Savans for the purpose of obtaining the breed. In an unlucky moment, also, our terrestrial resolves to learn the Lunar language. say unlucky, for, "Some freethinkers began to allege that he was endued with reason." The orthodox world opposed this new extravagant notion with the greatest furore, and treated it as "a most

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