Having lately translated the Fragment of an old Poet which describes Womankind under several Characters, and supposes them to have drawn their different Manners and Dispositions from those Animals and Elements out of which he tells us they were compounded; I had some Thoughts of giving the Sex their Revenge, by laying together in another Paper the many vicious Characters which prevail in the Male World, and shewing the different Ingredients that go to the making up of such different Humours and Constitutions. Horace has a Thought [1] which is something akin to this, when, in order to excuse himself to his Mistress, for an Invective which he had written against her, and to account for that unreasonable Fury with which the Heart of Man is often transported, he tells us that, when Prometheus made his Man of Clay, in the kneading up of his Heart, he season’d it with some furious Particles of the Lion.  But upon turning this Plan to and fro in my Thoughts, I observed so many unaccountable Humours in Man, that I did not know out of what Animals to fetch them.  Male Souls are diversify’d with so many Characters, that the World has not Variety of Materials sufficient to furnish out their different Tempers and Inclinations.  The Creation, with all its Animals and Elements, would not be large enough to supply their several Extravagancies.

Instead therefore of pursuing the Thought of Simonides, I shall observe, that as he has exposed the vicious Part of Women from the Doctrine of Praeexistence, some of the ancient Philosophers have, in a manner, satirized the vicious Part of the human Species in general, from a Notion of the Souls Postexistence, if I may so call it; and that as Simonides describes Brutes entering into the Composition of Women, others have represented human Souls as entering into Brutes.  This is commonly termed the Doctrine of Transmigration, which supposes that human Souls, upon their leaving the Body, become the Souls of such Kinds of Brutes as they most resemble in their Manners; or to give an Account of it as Mr. Dryden has described it in his Translation of Pythagoras his Speech in the fifteenth Book of Ovid, where that Philosopher dissuades his Hearers from eating Flesh: 

  Thus all things are but alter’d, nothing dies,
  And here and there th’ unbody’d Spirit flies: 
  By Time, or Force, or Sickness dispossess’d,
  And lodges where it lights, in Bird or Beast,
  Or hunts without till ready Limbs it find,
  And actuates those according to their Kind: 
  From Tenement to Tenement is toss’d: 
  The Soul is still the same, the Figure only lost. 
    Then let not Piety be put to Flight,
  To please the Taste of Glutton-Appetite;
  But suffer inmate Souls secure to dwell,
  Lest from their Seats your Parents you expel;
  With rabid Hunger feed upon your Kind,
  Or from a Beast dislodge a Brothers Mind.