sar found its tenets propagated among the Gauls
beyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as the
learned and travelled Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford tells us,
"without any sign of decrepitude or decay, over the Burman,
Chinese, Tartar, Tibetan, and Indian nations, including at least
six hundred and fifty millions of mankind."1 There is abundant
evidence to prove that this scheme of thought prevailed at a very
early period among the Egyptians, all classes and sects of the
Hindus, the Persian disciples of the Magi, and the Druids, and, in
a later age, among the Greeks and Romans as represented by Musaus,
Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Macrobius, Ovid, and many others. It
was generally adopted by the Jews from the time of the Babylonian
captivity. Traces of it have been discovered among the ancient
Scythians, the African tribes, some of the Pacific Islanders, and
various aboriginal nations both of North and of South America.
Charlevoix says some tribes of Canadian Indians believed in a
transmigration of souls; but, with a curious mixture of fancy and
reflection, they limited it to the souls of little children, who,
being balked of this life in its beginning, they thought would try
it again. Their bodies, accordingly, were buried at the sides of
roads, that their spirits might pass into pregnant women
travelling by. A belief in the metempsychosis limited in the same
way to the souls of children also prevailed among the Mexicans.2
The Maricopas, by the Gila, believe when they die they shall
transmigrate into birds, beasts, and reptiles, and shall return to
the banks of the Colorado, whence they were driven by the Yumas.
They will live there in caves and woods, as wolves, rats, and
snakes; so will their enemies the Yumas; and they will fight
together.3 On the western border of the United States, only three
or four years ago, two Indians having been sentenced to be hung
for murder, the chiefs of their tribe came in and begged that they
might be shot or burned instead, as they looked upon hanging with
the utmost horror, believing that the spirit of a person who is
thus strangled to death goes into the next world in a foul manner,
and that it assumes a beastly form. The Sandwich Islanders
sometimes threw their dead into the sea to be devoured by sharks,
supposing their souls would animate these monsters and cause them

1 Wilson, Two Lectures on the Religious Opinions of the Hindus, p.
64.

2 Kingsborough, Anti