Hereupon, Dr.Reasono informed me that these calculations of the revolutions of truth DID lead to certain moral extravagances, and in many instances to ruinous speculations in ideas; that the academy of Leaphigh, and, so far as his information extended, the academy of every other country, had found the subject of truth, more particularly moral truth, the one of all others the most difficult to manage, the most likely to be abused, and the most dangerous to promulgate.

I was moreover promised, at a future day, some illustrations of this branch of the subject.
"To pursue the more regular thread of my lecture," continued Dr.
Reasono, when he had politely made this little digression, "we now divide these portions of the created world into animated and vegetable nature; the former is again divided into the improvable, and the unimprovable, and the retrogressive.

The improvable embraces all those species which are marching, by slow, progressive, but immutable mutations, towards the perfection of terrestrial life, or to that last, elevated, and sublime condition of mortality, in which the material makes its final struggle with the immaterial--mind with matter.

The improvable class of animals, agreeably to the monikin dogmas, commences with those species in which matter has the most unequivocal ascendency, and terminates with those in which mind is as near perfection as this mortal coil will allow.

We hold that mind and matter, in that mysterious union which connects the spiritual with the physical being, commence in the medium state, undergoing, not, as some men have pretended, transmigrations of the soul only, but such gradual and imperceptible changes of both soul and body, as have peopled the world with so many wonderful beings--wonderful, mentally and physically; and all of which (meaning all of the improvable class) are no more than animals of the same great genus, on the high road of tendencies, who are advancing towards the last stage of improvement, previously to their final translation to another planet, and a new existence.
"The retrogressive class is composed of those specimens which, owing to their destiny, take a false direction; which, instead of tending to the immaterial, tend to the material; which gradually become more and more under the influence of matter, until, by a succession of physical translations, the will is eventually lost, and they become incorporated with the earth itself.