illness. This led to his acquisition of a microscope, which he was enabled
to purchase, owing to his having spent his autumn vacation of 1841 in the
hospital, prostrated by typhoid fever; being a pupil, he was nursed
without expense, and on his recovery he found himself in possession of the
savings of his small resources.

"Savonarola," says Castelar, "would, under different circumstances,
undoubtedly have been a good husband, a tender father; a man unknown to
history, utterly powerless to print upon the sands of time and upon the
human soul the deep trace which he has left; but misfortune came to visit
him, to crush his heart, and to impart that marked melancholy which
characterizes a soul in grief; and the grief that circled his brows with a
crown of thorns was also that which wreathed them with the splendor of
immortality. His hopes were centered in the woman he loved, his life was
set upon the possession of her, and when her family finally rejected him,
partly on account of his profession, and partly on account of his person,
believed that it was death that had come upon him, when in truth it was
immortality."

It is however, impossible to deny the existence of evil, and the reason
for it has long exercised the human intellect. The Savage solves it by the
supposition of evil Spirits. The Greeks attributed the misfortunes of men
in great measure to the antipathies and jealousies of gods and goddesses.
Others have imagined two divine principles, opposite and antagonistic--the
one friendly, the other hostile, to men.

Freedom of action, however, seems to involve the existence of evil. If any
power of selection be left us, much must depend on the choice we make. In
the very nature of things, two and two cannot make five. Epictetus
imagines Jupiter addressing man as follows: "If it had been possible to