SPECTRES.

            “I have been informed by old and experienced chemists,” says Dr. W. D. Dorris, of Nashville, “that to take the ashes of a plant, insect, or animal, properly prepared, and hermetically sealed, in a glass vessel, filled with distilled water, and exposed to the influence of the sun and moon for two years, it will, about the expiration of that time, show a transparent likeness of the original animal, plant, or insect, in the water above spoken of.”

            Whether the above be a real fact, or fiction, I pretend not to say. But the alleged “transparent likeness” is “the spirit” of the animal or insect “in prison;” and sufficiently well explains what I supposititiously affirmed of the antediluvians in their present nonentity. The transparent likeness of an insect besides its ashes is more than exists of “the giants,” the mongrel progeny of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men,” swept into prison by the Noachic flood. If you speak of them you cannot speak of them as persons; but as of spirits, or of phantasms, transparent likenesses, now in prison. Antediluvian “spirits in prison” are postdiluvian phantasmata, whose originals were the flesh and blood, whose violence filled the earth; and with whom God’s spirit in Noah strove for 120 years. What better name or term can be applied to them than “spirits,” which have neither flesh nor bones? The spirits of the antediluvians, supposed now to exist in prison, and to be preached to by disembodied evangelists, and missionaries, are equivalent to the insect-spirits, &c.; for it is affirmed of men, cattle, beasts, fowl, fish, and reptiles, by Solomon, that “they all have one ruach” or spirit. Whatever is demanded, therefore, for dead men’s ghosts, must be also conceded to the ghost of a flea. If observed at all they are but spectral impressions, or “transparent likenesses,” without intelligence or reality.

EDITOR.

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