Note 1 — AN ADVENTURE IN INDIA.

Perhaps it would be impossible at the present day to convince scientists that oysters formerly conversed intelligibly with mankind and protested eloquently against human injustice; but all men are not scientists, and there are many worthy people who still have implicit faith in ancient Semitic records—who firmly believe in miracles and prodigies—and who would consider it rank heresy to doubt that the serpent, though now as mute as an oyster, formerly held a very animated conversation, in the original Edenic language, with the inexperienced and confiding female who then graced with her charming presence the bowers of Paradise; and this sacred narrative of the "maiden and the reptile" is quite as repugnant to modern science as the sentimental fish story of "Pythagoras and the oyster".

As a matter of fact, the doctrine of the metempsichosis, as taught by the Samian sage, was formerly held in great repute by the most civilized nations of antiquity, and it is surely as easy to credit the assertion of our author, that the ancient Gymnosophists "had learned the language of beasts and plants" as to believe the unquestioned and orthodox statement that a certain quadruped, (Asinus vulgaris,) —whose romantic history is recorded in the twenty-second chapter of Numbers,—was once upon a time able to converse in very good Hebrew with Monsieur Balaam, an ancient prophet of great merit and renown.—E.