344. I heard two presidents of the English Royal Society, Sir Hans Sloane and Martin Folkes, conversing together in the spiritual world about the existence of seeds and eggs, and about productions from them on the earth. The former ascribed them to nature, and said that nature was endowed from creation with a power and force to produce such things by means of the sun heat. The other declared that this force is in nature unceasingly from God the Creator. That the controversy might be settled, a beautiful bird appeared to Sir Hans Sloane, and he was asked to examine it to see whether it differed in the least particular from a similar bird on earth. He held it in his hand, examined it, and declared that there was no difference. For he knew that it was nothing but an affection of some angel represented outside him as a bird, and that it would vanish or cease with the affection that produced it. And this indeed happened. By this experience, Sir Hans Sloane was convinced that nature contributes nothing whatever to the production of vegetables and animals, but that they are produced solely by what flows into the natural world out of the spiritual world. He said that, if that bird were to be infilled in its minutest parts with corresponding matters from the earth, and thus fixed, it would be a lasting bird like the birds on earth; and that it is the same with such things as are from hell. To this he added that if he had known what he now knew of the spiritual world, he would have ascribed to nature no more than this, that it serves the spiritual which is from God, in fixing those things which inflow unceasingly into nature.