subsequent gold-winged butterfly; and also in the chick, whose tiny bill perforates its hard surrounding stone-and-mortar sphere—for it batters and pecks at the sides of its prison-shell and cell when the process of incubation is nearly finished, whereupon the bird enters upon a new phase of existence; and so also does the human soul, when its period is completed. All Nature is a system of births.
These things are stated and these principles laid down, in order to undeceive those who have accepted as true the many crude and materially defective hypotheses purporting to come from 'Royal Circles' in the Soul-world, through scores of modern eolists. My design is to show the rightly dying what they must expect when rightly dead. True, there is an increasing number of Spiritualists and others who accept the revelations of mediums on the principle interdum stultus bene loquitur; yet there are others who accept nine-tenths of what purports to come from the worlds beyond, merely because of its claim. Truth will bear its own weight; if not now, then in the course of coming time; still it is ever and always best for every one to reason well on every proposition or statement offered as coming from the world of spirits—this book's contents, of course, included. Amongst other notions, which along with my co-believers on earth I had imbibed, was that which declares the Spirit-land to be a fixed revolving zone—a sort of second edition of the earth and its adjuncts. I had expected to find my last home on one of those aerial belts, occupying space just as a town or city does. What an error! No two antipodal things can be more unlike—for I found that all the untold magnificence that now lay outspread before me was, just as my former
