posing and grand; but compared to the magnificent structures that rear
their towers high into space from those glittering points that attract
your eye, they are poor and insignificant.

Yet, as being the highest expression of your intellectual unfolding, we
look upon them with admiration, even as you regard the rude attempts of
the Egyptians and the earlier races in their grotesquely formed images
and temples.

The inhabitants of some of the planets attain a life many times the
duration of man's. One of the causes of this prolonged existence is the
great age and refinement of the planet. While it is undergoing change,
and preparing the vegetable for the animal, and the animal for the mental
creation, the conditions that ensue are insalubrious, and conducive to
disease and death. But when the perfection of the natural world is
attained--when it becomes, so to say, spiritualized, and its grosser
elements are absorbed--then the human being can live on its surface arid
develop his faculties from century to century.

The thoughtful reader will perceive from this statement that the spirits
who have inhabited these superior planets must have attained a far
greater perfection than those who have inhabited your earth, and the
spiritual existence, or heaven, to which such beings migrate, is in
advance of the heavens in which the dwellers of earth are born.

The spiritual heavens correspond to the firmament of the natural world,
and thus there are myriads of systems of spiritual worlds.

The residents of these planets visit earth as elder brothers who take by
the hand the little faltering infants. But intercourse with the earth is
more difficult for them than for your own native spirits, from the fact
that the magnetic atmosphere does not assimilate with them. From the
earth's spirit world, scientific minds of rare development only have been
able to visit the spirit homes of those planetary inhabitants.

What I have said can give but a faint idea of the population of the
unseen worlds. As a drop of water which is clear and unoccupied to the
eye, when viewed through the microscope is found to be peopled with
living creations, so the worlds that overspread the heavens are peopled
in every part that the eye can cover.

Man is indeed nothing; and yet he is the whole--a mere speck, a point,
and yet God himself in the aggregate.

DR. JOHN W. FRANCIS.

_THE INFLUENCE OF MIND UPON MATTER, AND THE CAUSES OF INSANITY AND THE