lato,
Confucius, Aristotle, Euclid, Zeno, Diogenes, and Seneca, were merely so
many admonishing types of the future condition of man, indicating their
near approach to the monikin, or to the final translation."

"And Epicurus--"

"Was an exaggeration of the material principle, that denoted the
retrogression of a large portion of the race towards brutality and
matter. These phenomena are still of daily occurrence."

"Do you then hold the opinion, for instance, Dr. Reasono, that Socrates
is now a monikin philosopher, with his brain unravelled and rendered
logically consecutive, and that Epicurus is transformed perchance into a
hippopotamus or a rhinoceros, with tusks, horns, and hide?"

"You quite mistake our dogmas, Sir John. We do not believe in
transmigration in the individual at all, but in the transmigration of
classes. Thus, we hold that whenever a given generation of men, in a
peculiar state of society, attain, in the aggregate, a certain degree
of moral improvement, or mentality, as we term it in the schools, that
there is an admixture of their qualities in masses, some believe by
scores, others think by hundreds, and others again pretend by thousands;
and if it is found, by the analysis that is regularly instituted by
nature, that the proportions are just, the material is consigned to the
monikin birth; if not, it is repudiated, and either kneaded anew for
another human experiment, or consigned to the vast stores of dormant
matter. Thus all individuality, so far as it is connected with the past,
is lost."

"But, sir, existing facts contradict one of the most important of your
propositions; while you admit that a want of a change in the seasons
would be a consequence of the perpendicularity of the earth's axis to
the plane of its present orbit, this change in the seasons is a matter
not to be denied. Flesh and blood testify against you here, no less than
reason."

"I spoke of things as they were, sir, previously to the birth of
the monikinia; since which time a great, salutary, harmonious, and
contemplated alteration has occurred. Nature had reserved the polar
region for the new species, with divers obvious and benevolent purposes.
They were rendered uninhabitable by the obliquity of the sun's rays; and
though matter, in the shape of mastodons and whales, with an instinct of
its antagonistic destination, had frequently invaded their precincts,
it was only to leave the remains of the first embedded in fields