which recommended it to the ancient

You have too much learning, CLEANTHES, to be at all surprised at this opinion, which, you know, was maintained by almost all the Theists of antiquity, and chiefly prevails in their discourses and reasonings. For though, sometimes, the ancient philosophers reason from final causes, as if they thought the world the workmanship of God; yet it appears rather their favourite notion to consider it as his body, whose organisation renders it subservient to him. And it must be confessed, that, as the universe resembles more a human body than it does the works of human art and contrivance, if our limited analogy could ever, with any propriety, be extended to the whole of nature Diamond water, the inference seems juster in favour of the ancient than the modern theory.
There are many other advantages, too, in the former theory,  theologians. Nothing more repugnant to all their notions, because nothing more repugnant to common experience, than mind without body; a mere spiritual substance, which fell not under their senses nor comprehension, and of which they had not observed one single instance throughout all nature. Mind and body they knew, because they felt both: an order, arrangement, organisation, or internal machinery, in both, they likewise knew, after the same manner: and it could not but seem reasonable to transfer this experience to the universe; and to suppose the divine mind and body to be also coeval, and to have, both of them, order and arrangement naturally inherent in them, and inseparable from them.
Here, therefore, is a new species of Anthropomorphism, CLEANTHES, on which you may deliberate; and a theory which seems not liable to any considerable difficulties. You are too much superior, surely, to systematical prejudices, to find any more difficulty in supposing an animal body to be, originally, of itself, or from unknown causes, possessed of order and organisation, than in supposing a similar order to belong to mind. But the vulgar prejudice, that body and mind ought always to accompany each other, ought not hong kong company formation, one should think, to be entirely neglected; since it is founded on vulgar experience, the only guide which you profess to follow in all these theological inquiries. And if you assert, that our limited experience is an unequal standard, by which to judge of the unlimited extent of nature; you entirely abandon your own hypothesis, and must thenceforward adopt our Mysticism, as you call it, and admit of the absolute incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature.
This theory, I own, replied CLEANTHES, has never before occurred to me, though a pretty natural one; and I cannot readily, upon so short an examination and reflection, deliver any opinion with regard to it. You are very scrupulous, indeed, said PHILO: were I to examine any system of yours, I should not have acted with half that caution and reserve, in starting objections and difficulties to it. However, if any thing occur to you, you will oblige us by proposing it.
Why then, replied CLEANTHES, it seems to me, that, though the world does, in many circumstances, resemble an animal body; yet is the analogy also defective in many circumstances the most material: no organs of sense; no seat of thought or reason; no one precise origin of motion and action. In short, it seems to bear a stronger resemblance to a vegetable than to an animal, and your inference would be so far inconclusive in favour of the soul of the world.
But, in the next place, your theory seems to imply the eternity of the world; and that is a principle, which, I think, can be refuted by the strongest reasons and probabilities. I shall suggest an argument to this purpose, which, I believe, has not been insisted on by any writer. Those, who reason from the late origin of arts and sciences, though their inference wants not force, may perhaps be refuted by considerations derived from the nature of human society, which is in continual revolution, between ignorance and knowledge Veda Salon, liberty and slavery, riches and poverty; so that it is impossible for us, from our limited experience, to foretell with assurance what events may or may not be expected. Ancient learning and history seem to have been in great danger of entirely perishing after the inundation of the barbarous nations; and had these convulsions continued a little longer, or been a little more violent, we should not probably have now known what passed in the world a few centuries before us. Nay, were it not for the superstition of the Popes, who preserved a little jargon of Latin, in order to support the appearance of an ancient and universal church, that tongue must have been utterly lost; in which case, the Western world, being totally barbarous, would not have been in a fit disposition for receiving the GREEK language and learning, which was conveyed to them after the sacking of CONSTANTINOPLE. When learning and books had been extinguished, even the mechanical arts would have fallen considerably to decay; and it is easily imagined, that fable or tradition might ascribe to them a much later origin than the true one. This vulgar argument, therefore, against the eternity of the world, seems a little precarious.
But here appears to be the foundation of a better argument. LUCULLUS was the first that brought cherry-trees from ASIA to EUROPE; though that tree thrives so well in many EUROPEAN climates, that it grows in the woods without any culture. Is it possible, that throughout a whole eternity, no EUROPEAN had ever passed into ASIA, and thought of transplanting so delicious a fruit into his own country? Or if the tree was once transplanted and propagated, how could it ever afterwards perish? Empires may rise and fall, liberty and slavery succeed alternately, ignorance and knowledge give place to each other; but the cherry-tree will still remain in the woods of GREECE, SPAIN, and ITALY, and will never be affected by the revolutions of human society.

There was one terrible manifestation

Perhaps the first woman in history to sleep in a Trappist bed, I was allotted the abbot’s bag bed and seaweed pillow, and the sawn-off log for my chair or table. I woke to hear the natives singing a Gregorian chant in the little chapel near by. Half clothed and, for all the untiring work of the missioners, still but half-civilized, they comprised the Nyool-nyool tribe dermes, of the totem of a local species of snake. Most of the women and men had their two front teeth knocked out, and some still wore bones through their noses. Infant cannibalism was practised, where it could not be prevented-as it still is among all circumcised groups. One of the old men, Bully-bulluma, having been an epic meat-hunter in his day, had eight wives. Another, Goodowel, was dressed in trousers and shirt, one stocking, his face painted red with white stripes from each corner of his mouth in broad lines. A red band was round his head, the hair drawn back to form a tight knob, and stuck in the knob was a tuft of white cockatoo feathers and a small wooden emblem. I know now that he was in the sixth degree of initiation.

Although they had tried their hardest, with prayer and precept, to teach these natives cleanliness and Christian living, giving their very lives to the work in torture and privation dermes , those Spanish priests could hope for little headway in the first generation.  of savagery that I can never forget.

A man had been found dying of spear-wounds out in the bush, and carried to the Mission as he was breathing his last. I watched two of the lay brothers bearing the stretcher to one of the huts, a horde of natives following. I noticed that they held their burden curiously high in the air. Suddenly, as it was lowered for entry to a doorway, the natives crowding round, to my horror, fell upon the body of the dying man, and put their lips to his in a brutal eagerness to inhale the last breath. They believed that in so doing they were absorbing his strength and virtue, and his very vital spark, and all the warnings of the “white father” would not keep them from it. The man was of course dead when we extricated him, and it was a ghastly sight to see the lucky “breath catcher” scoop in his cheeks as he swallowed the “spirit breath” that gave him double hunting power.

I was awakened by the sound of the conch shell which did duty for a monastery bell in that primitive spot, and when I went out into the open I was surrounded by all the women and children, a bright, pleasant little crowd, but oh! how dirty! Although the monks for some years had issued the dictum “No bath, no breakfast,” the natives preferred the lesser of two evils dermes, and went hungry until the ban was lifted. Shack dormitories had been erected for the unmarried girls and men, but most of the natives came in from the camps in the bush where they slept under the trees. Their beds were hollows scooped in the sand where a fire had been burning, the sand and the stones sometimes so hot that they left raw wounds in the flesh. Father Nicholas told us that they ate dirt in handfuls, and that the women sometimes ate their new-born babies, but that since the advent of the Mission, with its admonitions and its daily distribution of pumpkin and rice and tea and flour, cannibalism was not nearly so much in evidence.

fired both barrels

The conversation turns on the power of animals to make their wants understood in moments of danger or excitement. Says the Yahudi, craning his long neck round to see that everyone within half a mile is listening, and interrupting one of my choicest anecdotes, which, I am led to believe, I tell with considerable success:— ‘That recalls to my mind a singular adventure in Japan reenex . One day, accompanied only by my dog, I was enjoying a morning’s shooting, when I noticed a fine cluster of ducks upon a neighbouring lagoon. To reach them without attracting attention was a difficult matter, for, barring a tree and a monster log some eighty yards to its right, there was no cover of any sort to be seen. Creeping warily along, I gained the shelter of the tree, and thence proceeded to wriggle myself under cover of the log. Once there, I took careful aim,  and brought down eight duck, two teal, a snipe, and a woodpigeon; but imagine my astonishment, when the smoke cleared away, at seeing the log, behind which I was crouching, rise up, wheel slowly round, and look me in the face. You may stare, gentlemen, but you cannot stare away the fact that it was an alligator, thirty-five feet long and four feet through, with a mouth like the entrance to the Bottomless Pit, yawning in my face. I took one good look at him, then went for the tree at express rate, leaving my gun behind me — not that, mind you, I had any fault to find with the gun, but because my mind was so set upon reaching the tree, that I had no time to think of other things. With the noise of a steam roller, the alligator came behind me, and we took our places — he at the bottom of the tree, I at the top. It was a moment of intense excitement, and I assure you that his conversation was as clear to me as noonday reenex.

‘” Good morning! “ he began. “ You seem to have had an excellent day’s sport. Pray come down and let me assist you in collecting your bag! ”

‘” I thank you,” was my reply, at the same time taking a tighter grasp of my situation, as I noticed, with modesty, the appetite the sight of my legs was occasioning him, “ but at present I am too much entranced with the beauty of the landscape around me, to care much for fame as a sportsman. Pray collect and accept my game yourself reenex! ”

‘This affability on my part caused him to betray his real feelings.

‘” Many thanks,” he replied, “ but wild duck requires too much hanging for my taste. Your legs, now — but there, do pray come down.” So saying, he opened his mouth and yawned till I could plainly see the undigested boots and celluloid collar of his last victim. After that we both felt that nothing further could pass between us.

‘Look me in the face, ladies and gentlemen, if you please. I assure you that for no less than eighteen hours I remained in that uncomfortable position, clinging to that branch, with the alligator’s mouth yawning like a gravel pit beneath me. You will ask why I did not shoot him. I reply, because my gun was on the plain, and my cartridges were in my pouch, and my pouch was with my faithful dog, and my faithful dog was in the interior of the alligator. Eighteen hours, nineteen hours, and even twenty hours went by, and still no chance of escape presented itself. I began to be annoyed, for my hunger was excruciating. At last a brilliant idea flashed through my brain dermes.