ff and grow new ones, than he can grow new
legs or arms; neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the
solicitor is a very serious thing. As for his bank--failure of his
bank's action may be as fatal to a man _as_ failure of his heart. I
have said nothing about the medical or spiritual adviser, but most
men grow into the society that surrounds them by the help of these
four main tap-roots, and not only into the world of humanity, but
into the universe at large. We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers,
and greengrocers, almost ad libitum, but these are low developments,
and correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those of us again
who are not highly enough organized to have grown a solicitor or
banker can generally repair the loss of whatever social organization
they may possess as freely as lizards are said to grow new tails;
but this with the higher social, as well as organic, developments is
only possible to a very limited extent.

The doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls--a
doctrine to which the foregoing considerations are for the most part
easy corollaries--crops up no matter in what direction we allow our
thoughts to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body
as well as of soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have
transmigrated together, far from it; but that, as we can often
recognize a transmigrated mind in an alien body, so we not less
often see a body that is clearly only a transmigration, linked on to
someone else's new and alien soul. We meet people every day whose
bodies are evidently those of men and women long dead, but whose
appearance we know through their portraits. We see them going about
in omnibuses, railway carriages, and in all public places. The
cards have been shuffled, and they have drawn fresh lots in life and
nationalities, but anyone fairly well up in medieval and last-
century portraiture knows them at a glance.

Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I
recognized, only he seemed to have got younger. He was with a
friend, and his face was in continual play, but for some little time
I puzzled in vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him
before. All of a sudden I remembered he was King Francis I of
France. I had hitherto thought the face of this king impossible,
but when I saw it in play I understood it. His great contemporary
Henry VIII keeps a restaurant in Oxford Street. Falstaff drove one
of