dust it has borrowed for awhile, it is perfectly conceivable that the soul that animated it has already organized for itself some subtler, interior organism, ready with the decay of the grosser body to step out into the unseen world where all its affections and hopes have long been centred. When several vapors can occupy simultaneously a given space, and the waves of ether can move through, and work with, the coarser structure of solid or opaque bodies without disturbing either, then there is no improbability in the coëxistence of such an ethereal body within the sheath of the coarser flesh that enswathes it. It would be but another illustration of the cosmic economy, which throughout nature builds up system within system, like the conjurer's nest of balls. Whether we regard the soul as seated, according to the old view, in some subtle effluence incarnated in the fleshly temple, or as scientific monists today suppose, in some single superintending atom or royal monad, enthroned in the brain, in either case it can organize about itself some firm atomic phalanx or indivisible vortex ring of ether, equipped with which it may enter on its new life with an organism equal to the demands of its new destiny. Wherever life is nobly led there is constantly being evolved something which belongs not to the dust of the body, a conscious personality more permanent and unitary than the flux of the atoms which pass in and out, a character whose attributes of reason, love, and righteousness have no explanation in any chemical properties. As force is the preeminently persistent thing, this vital force of the spirit, the highest shoot of the cosmic tree of life, naturally persists. The rending of the flesh is but the release of the soul.

"Eternal process, moving on

From state to state, the spirit walks.
And these are but the shattered stalks
Or ruined chrysalis of one."

When the opaque is being found transparent and an inch of air to be the avenue for a multitude of diverse waves, and streams of energies, of entirely different order, cross and recross without the slightest interference, is it not conceivable that this veil which separates us from the spiritual world may be after all a mere film, whose very thinness makes it appear so impenetrable?

"A turn, a change as slight as when the light pebble, lying on thin ice, feels it melt and falls to the bottom, may be all" (as Edwin Arnold suggests) "that is necessary to

lift the curtain of another and utterly transformed universe, which is yet not really another, but this same one that we see imperfectly with present eyes and think timidly with present thoughts."

The last utterance of the poet Wordsworth was, "Is that my dear Dora?" a daughter deceased, whom he saw as with open eyes. Such apparent lifting of the veil for brief moments is not at all infrequent, and there are many of these occurrences, free from all suspicion of delirium, that are abundantly certified. Approaching death, instead of enfeebling consciousness, as it should do if the mind were but a material effect, often seems to release it from the weakness of the body for a time. Dr. La Roche, a physician of Philadelphia, some years ago, published a treatise entitled, "On the Resumption of the Mental Faculties at the Approach of Death." He stated that the mind often becomes lucid just before death, even in cases where the brain is greatly diseased, "where inflammation of the coverings is present and even where there is change in the brain substance itself."

Doctor Brown-Sequard has observed that cholera patients often retain clear and active minds, even when the blood is becoming black and clotted, in the last stages of the disease. In cases of chronic insanity or life-long idiocy, where the lesions or imperfections of the brain were incurable, the normal self has reappeared above the wreck, for a brief period, setting a farewell signal of the soul's independence. Harriet Martineau reported in Household Words (vol. 9, p. 200), the case of a congenital idiot who had lost his mother when he was two years old and who could not subsequently be made cognizant of anything relating to her; who yet when dying at the age of thirty suddenly turned his head, looked bright and sensible, and exclaimed in a tone, never heard before, "Oh, my mother; how beautiful!" A friend in New York, a most intelligent and veracious woman, once told me how a short time before her young niece died, she expressed a fear of dying alone; but in a moment, her face lighted up and she said: "No, I am not afraid-for here is Charlie and George and grandpa" (mentioning those of her relatives who had already passed on). After a little while she said again, "Oh, it is beautiful, beautiful!" Similar experiences have been published by Doctor Clarke of Boston in his book called "Visions"; and in almost every town or large family circle some one can repeat some analogous occurrence. have always been very slow in crediting the so-called revela

I

tions of the spiritualists and the visions of the hypnotic. But do not these significant visions of the dying, while still in full retention of their faculties, impress even the most cautious with the conviction that at such times the veil that separates the seen from the unseen world is really parted, for a moment, for a consoling glimpse to those so painfully bereaved?

Not infrequently when the curtain of night is drawn about you, you have been summoned to the telephone, and putting your ear to the receiving tube, heard familiar voices issue out of the darkness, guided by the slender pathway modern science provides. The friends were miles away, perhaps, or you did not even know at all where they were: you but recognized their voices, received their messages, and had no shadow of doubt about their continued existence. So when out of the cloud of mystery about us, significant voices and tender messages come to us by some strange telephony; prescient aspirations of the soul, comforting intuitions of the believing heart, marvels of the open tomb or the risen Christ, or modern miracles that demonstrate the superiority of mind to body and the thinness of the shell that shuts us out from the spiritual world, then let us receive them reverently and gratefully. We ought not to fear, but to rejoice in the advance of modern knowledge. This Saul of science has now become one of the prophets, for these latter-day miracles are daily making the hopes of religion seem less wild and fanciful. These fairy-tales that science is turning into everyday prose, are showing us how much more marvellous than any Scripture miracle are the realities of God's universe. The invisible forces are the mightest. Beyond the farthest range to which the telescope pushes the domain of the visible, stretches the invisible; and by its unseen energies, all this brave show that salutes the eye, is kept alive. In every inch of space, the fidelity of God, the wisdom of God, the power and love of God, are hiding. We rise to higher ranges of being as we match ourselves to these eternal rhythms and make our hearts the obedient conductors of these grander and invisible currents of force. It is incredible that God should intend that humanity's progress in knowledge should be only on the physical level. We may reasonably anticipate, therefore, a time when large fields of the spiritual shall open their secrets to us. Cheer ing rays of light, with most precious disclosures, already herald this dayspring from on high, which shall make the scepticism of to-day seem gratuitous doubt. In the light

of nature's grandeurs and the weakness of the human mind, is it rational that the martyr faith and poetic visions of our race should outrun the realities of the universe and transcend the power of the Almighty? Prof. Stanley Jevons in his "Principles of Science" well says, "Science does nothing to reduce the number of strange things we may believe." And Prof. J. P. Cooke, so long professor of chemistry at Harvard, even more emphatically says, "There is nothing in science so improbable or inconceivable that it may not be realized."

The more we know of nature, the more replete we find it with treasured marvels and inexhaustible infinitudes. The more we learn of life, the more its sacred joys and duties overtop in august dignity all our dreams. As daily experience shows that all that is seen is temporal, we may rationally look to the realm of the unseen for whatever shall be eternal. As we review the history both of our individual lives and of the race as a whole, the steady movement disclosed is that of a continued transcendence in the reality of things to all our expectations. Here is the unshakable foundation for human hope, that life at every step leads on and on, to loftier heights, and the present no more plainly surpasses the past than the future is sure to surpass the present.

MAN IN HIS RELATION TO THE SOLAR SYS-
TEM, A SUBJECT FOR SCIENTIFIC
RE-EXAMINATION.

BY J. HEBER SMITH, M. D.

PART II.

In the preceding chapter there have been cited certain accepted principles of natural science concerning the laws of matter, ether, light, and vibration, on which a qualified belief in the probability of stellar influences upon mankind may be supposed to rest on a foundation of

reason.

Before attempting to offer claims for the recognition of astrology as, in any part, a body of experimental knowledge, or any farther plea for its reëxamination, I beg to refer briefly to certain other well-known natural laws, and to certain interactions and receptions of the ponderable bodies in space, quite generally acknowledged by scientists, which appear germane to our inquiry.

The Zodiac.-Were it not for the dazzling brilliancy of the sun we should see him against the background of familiar star-groups, passing seemingly (from the earth's motion in space) in a great circle through the constellations Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces. This circle, full of human interests, pantheon of the old mythologies and path of vanishing heroes, is called the ecliptic. In the course of a year the sun is successively in every degree of this circle, which intersects the equinoctial at an angle of twenty-three and one-half degrees. A zone of the heavens extending eight degrees on each side of it is called the zodiac, and the just-named constellations, with which our inquiries have principally to do, are called the zodiacal constellations. The earliest astronomers had found a way of tracing among the stars this path of their "Lord of Lights."

The sun does not cross the equinoctial at the same points of the ecliptic, but a little farther west each year, and of course a very little sooner. This difference is only fifty minutes of longitude, but in 25,870 years it will make the