marks are occultly recorded in the invisible epigraph of those enchanted germs, to be more or less developed when the flame on that new altar of later life, of which you are the sacred priestess, brings to reproduction such miraculous epitomes." She would not, and could not, understand, of course; yet all this is matter of common observation, the well-established fact of heredity by pangenesis, certain though incomprehensible. What, therefore, is there to be pronounced impossible, because of our blindness, in regard to endless continuity and developments of individuality, when out of the holy ignorance of such maidenly simplicity there can be thus subtly and steadfastly prepared the indescribable beginnings of motherhood? If one result of each human life should be to produce, more or less completely, a substantial, though at present invisible, environment for the next higher stage-while handing on, by collateral lives, the lamp of humanity

to new hands-that would not be really more strange than the condensation of the oak-tree in the acorn, or the natural sorcery of the contact of the milt and the spawn. "Miracles" are cheap enough!

Another consideration having some force, is that we should find ourselves speculating about this matter at all. All the other aspirations of infancy, youth, and manhood turn out more or less, as time rolls, to have been prophecies. Instincts explain and justify themselves, each by each. The body foresees and provides for its growth by appetite; the mind expands towards knowledge by childish curiosity; the young heart predicts, by the flushed cheek and quickening pulse, that gentle master-passion which it has not yet learned even to name. There is a significance, like the breath of a perpetual whisper from Nature, in the way in which the theme of his own immortality teases and haunts a man. Note also that he discusses

it least and decides about it most dogmatically in those diviner moments when the breath of a high impulse sweeps away work-a-day doubts and selfishnesses. What a blow to the philosophy of negation is the sailor leaping from the taffrail of his ship into an angry sea to save his comrade or to perish with him! He has never read either Plato or Schopenhauer-perhaps not even that heavenly verse, "Whoso loseth his life for my sake, the same shall save it." But arguments which are as far beyond philosophy, as the unconscious life is deeper than the conscious, sufficiently persuade him to plunge. "Love that stronger is than death" bids him dare, for her imperious sake, the weltering abyss; and any such deed of sacrifice and heroic contempt of peril, in itself almost proves that man knows more than he believes himself to know about his own immortality. Every miner working for wife and children in a "fiery" pit; every soldier standing cool and

firm for his country and flag in those desertzarebas of Stewart and Graham, offers a similar endorsement of Walt Whitman's indignant sentence, "If rats and maggots end us, then alarum! for we are betrayed.'

"Well," it will be said, "but we may be betrayed!" The bottom of the sea, as the dredging of the Challenger proves, is paved with relics of countless elaborate lives seemingly wasted. The great pyramid is a mountain of bygone nummulites. The statesman's marble statue is compacted from the shells and casts. of tiny creatures which had as good a right to immortality from their own point of view as he. Moreover, it may be urged, the suicide, who only seeks peace and escape from trouble, confronts death with just as firm a decisiveness as the brave sailor or dutiful soldier. Most suicides, however, in their last written words, seem to expect a change for the better, rather than extinction; and it is a curious proof of

the surviving propriety and self-respect of the very desperate, that forlorn women, jumping from Waterloo Bridge, almost always fold their shawls quite neatly, lay them on the parapet, and place their bonnets carefully atop, as if the fatal balustrade were but a boudoir for the disrobing soul. In regard to the argument of equal rights of continuous existence for all things which live, it must be admitted. If the bathybius-nay, even if the trees and the mosses are not, as to that which makes them individual, undying, man will never be. If life be not as inextinguishable in every egg of the herring and in every bird and beast, as in the poet and the sage, it is extinguishable in angels and archangels. What, then, is that specialized existence which, some believe, can and does survive and take new shapes, when the small dying sea-creature drops its flake of pearl to the ooze, when the dog-fish swallows a thousand trivial herring-fry, and