The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the“father”of Geology:The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700In hisOrigin of Nations, he rightly adds:The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?We repeat the question asked inIsis Unveiled:Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock'sPre-historic Man, or Evans'Ancient Stone Implementsmust be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,1703whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.[pg 763]Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this isin Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. TheVedascountenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post-Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning1706—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands thatreäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since“retreated”and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period offairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect.Not one implementfit to bear comparison with thefinely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratumis to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with[pg 765]the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the“Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.As said by an Anthropologist inModern Thought:The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be,fossilman in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708[pg 766]This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in theBook of Enochbetween Noah and his“grandfather”Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in thePopular Science Review:If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on“The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,”shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)See, however, on these points,“Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless[pg 768]searchers after the thrice hypothetical“missing link.”Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of TheAntiquity of Manwould have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may notthe soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?This hypothesis is made in relation to evolutionnot being entirely dueto“natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the“Soul,”or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.Man is certainlynospecial creation. He is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is[pg 769]the“Eternal Pilgrim,”the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute“Unknowable.”In hisAntiquity of Man1711Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in hisIntroduction to the Literature of Europe:If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was madein the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature,not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand thatformshould be equally endowed with permanency.And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree'sFallacies of Darwinism, we read:Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715Our Globe being convulsed each time that itreäwakensfor a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into theparentform in the modern anthropoid.This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, andfar moreprobable, than many“scientific”theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of[pg 771]speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, thepresenttheories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effectdue to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the“father”of Geology:The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700In hisOrigin of Nations, he rightly adds:The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?We repeat the question asked inIsis Unveiled:Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock'sPre-historic Man, or Evans'Ancient Stone Implementsmust be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,1703whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.[pg 763]Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this isin Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. TheVedascountenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post-Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning1706—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands thatreäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since“retreated”and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period offairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect.Not one implementfit to bear comparison with thefinely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratumis to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with[pg 765]the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the“Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.As said by an Anthropologist inModern Thought:The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be,fossilman in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708[pg 766]This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in theBook of Enochbetween Noah and his“grandfather”Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in thePopular Science Review:If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on“The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,”shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)See, however, on these points,“Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless[pg 768]searchers after the thrice hypothetical“missing link.”Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of TheAntiquity of Manwould have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may notthe soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?This hypothesis is made in relation to evolutionnot being entirely dueto“natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the“Soul,”or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.Man is certainlynospecial creation. He is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is[pg 769]the“Eternal Pilgrim,”the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute“Unknowable.”In hisAntiquity of Man1711Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in hisIntroduction to the Literature of Europe:If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was madein the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature,not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand thatformshould be equally endowed with permanency.And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree'sFallacies of Darwinism, we read:Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715Our Globe being convulsed each time that itreäwakensfor a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into theparentform in the modern anthropoid.This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, andfar moreprobable, than many“scientific”theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of[pg 771]speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, thepresenttheories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effectdue to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the“father”of Geology:The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700In hisOrigin of Nations, he rightly adds:The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?We repeat the question asked inIsis Unveiled:Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock'sPre-historic Man, or Evans'Ancient Stone Implementsmust be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,1703whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.[pg 763]Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this isin Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. TheVedascountenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post-Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning1706—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands thatreäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since“retreated”and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period offairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect.Not one implementfit to bear comparison with thefinely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratumis to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with[pg 765]the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the“Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.As said by an Anthropologist inModern Thought:The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be,fossilman in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708[pg 766]This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in theBook of Enochbetween Noah and his“grandfather”Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in thePopular Science Review:If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on“The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,”shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)See, however, on these points,“Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless[pg 768]searchers after the thrice hypothetical“missing link.”Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of TheAntiquity of Manwould have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may notthe soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?This hypothesis is made in relation to evolutionnot being entirely dueto“natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the“Soul,”or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.Man is certainlynospecial creation. He is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is[pg 769]the“Eternal Pilgrim,”the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute“Unknowable.”In hisAntiquity of Man1711Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in hisIntroduction to the Literature of Europe:If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was madein the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature,not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand thatformshould be equally endowed with permanency.And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree'sFallacies of Darwinism, we read:Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715Our Globe being convulsed each time that itreäwakensfor a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into theparentform in the modern anthropoid.This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, andfar moreprobable, than many“scientific”theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of[pg 771]speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, thepresenttheories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effectdue to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the“father”of Geology:The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700In hisOrigin of Nations, he rightly adds:The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?We repeat the question asked inIsis Unveiled:Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock'sPre-historic Man, or Evans'Ancient Stone Implementsmust be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,1703whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.[pg 763]Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this isin Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. TheVedascountenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post-Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning1706—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands thatreäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since“retreated”and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period offairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect.Not one implementfit to bear comparison with thefinely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratumis to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with[pg 765]the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the“Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.As said by an Anthropologist inModern Thought:The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be,fossilman in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708[pg 766]This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in theBook of Enochbetween Noah and his“grandfather”Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in thePopular Science Review:If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on“The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,”shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)See, however, on these points,“Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless[pg 768]searchers after the thrice hypothetical“missing link.”Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of TheAntiquity of Manwould have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may notthe soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?This hypothesis is made in relation to evolutionnot being entirely dueto“natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the“Soul,”or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.Man is certainlynospecial creation. He is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is[pg 769]the“Eternal Pilgrim,”the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute“Unknowable.”In hisAntiquity of Man1711Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in hisIntroduction to the Literature of Europe:If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was madein the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature,not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand thatformshould be equally endowed with permanency.And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree'sFallacies of Darwinism, we read:Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715Our Globe being convulsed each time that itreäwakensfor a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into theparentform in the modern anthropoid.This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, andfar moreprobable, than many“scientific”theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of[pg 771]speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, thepresenttheories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effectdue to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the“father”of Geology:The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700In hisOrigin of Nations, he rightly adds:The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?We repeat the question asked inIsis Unveiled:Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock'sPre-historic Man, or Evans'Ancient Stone Implementsmust be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,1703whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.[pg 763]Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this isin Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. TheVedascountenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post-Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning1706—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands thatreäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since“retreated”and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period offairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect.Not one implementfit to bear comparison with thefinely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratumis to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with[pg 765]the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the“Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.As said by an Anthropologist inModern Thought:The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be,fossilman in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708[pg 766]This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in theBook of Enochbetween Noah and his“grandfather”Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in thePopular Science Review:If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on“The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,”shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)See, however, on these points,“Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless[pg 768]searchers after the thrice hypothetical“missing link.”Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of TheAntiquity of Manwould have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may notthe soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?This hypothesis is made in relation to evolutionnot being entirely dueto“natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the“Soul,”or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.Man is certainlynospecial creation. He is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is[pg 769]the“Eternal Pilgrim,”the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute“Unknowable.”In hisAntiquity of Man1711Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in hisIntroduction to the Literature of Europe:If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was madein the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature,not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand thatformshould be equally endowed with permanency.And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree'sFallacies of Darwinism, we read:Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715Our Globe being convulsed each time that itreäwakensfor a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into theparentform in the modern anthropoid.This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, andfar moreprobable, than many“scientific”theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of[pg 771]speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, thepresenttheories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effectdue to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer:
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697
The pre-historic is a new science, far, very far, from having said its last word.1697
According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities on the subject, and the“father”of Geology:
The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698
The expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in which it occurs,is based on the theory of progressive development, and itmayprove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yetwe have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races.1698
Nor has such evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!
This concession of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor Max Müller, whose attack on Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of language has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:
What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699
What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history? [Compare this with the Esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palæolithic European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture, which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.] Do we ever get an insight into their antecedents? Can we ever understand what after all is everywhere the most important and the most instructive lesson to learn—how they have come to be what they are?... Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called[pg 762]heathens, with their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be as old as the Hindûs, the Greeks and Romans [far older] ... They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive, may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages.1699
Professor George Rawlinson, M.A., remarks:
“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700
“The primeval savage”is a familiar term in modern literature, but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. Ratherall the evidence looks the other way.1700
In hisOrigin of Nations, he rightly adds:
The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701
The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a“golden age”which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.1701
How is the modern Evolutionist to meet this consensus of evidence?
We repeat the question asked inIsis Unveiled:
Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702
Does the finding of the remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then who were highly civilized? When the present population of the Earth has disappeared, and some Archæologist belonging to the“coming race”of the distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the nineteenth century was“just emerging from the Stone age”?1702
Another strange inconsistency in scientific theories is that Neolithic man is shown as being far more of a primitive savage than Palæolithic. Either Lubbock'sPre-historic Man, or Evans'Ancient Stone Implementsmust be at fault, or—both. For this is what we learn from these works and others:
(1) As we pass from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, the stone implements become rude lumbering makeshifts, instead of gracefully shaped and polished instruments. Pottery, and other useful arts disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such a reindeer!
(2) Palæolithic man lived in caves which he shared with hyænas and lions,1703whereas Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.
Every one who has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping and rude chopping of the early Palæolithic hatchets, to the relatively graceful stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use of metals. But this isin Europe, only a few portions of which were barely rising from the waters in the days of the highest Atlantean civilization. There were rude savages and highly civilized people then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason for maintaining that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified in setting us all down as Palæolithic savages? All the articles which Geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by Palæolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period—for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the Geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.
The Esoteric Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization; and now we learn that:
It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704
It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its traces are frequent in Neolithic times they become very scarce or altogether disappear in the age of the mammoth and the reindeer....1704
—another evidence of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, etc.) gradually brought the worship back. TheVedascountenance no idols; all the modern Hindû writings do.
In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705
In the early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl- and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical figures or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic times, such idols are no longer found, or, if found, it is so rarely that archæologists still dispute as to their existence ... the only ones which may be said with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de[pg 764]Braye in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period ... which appear to be intended for female figures of life size.1705
And these may have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond Post-Tertiary or Quaternary times—though Abbé Bourgeois' flints may serve as a warning1706—seems to point to the truth of another Esoteric statement, which runs thus:
Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the seas.
Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and islands thatreäppeared—while their predecessors formed the floors of new oceans—deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter having since“retreated”and made room for the table lands of Central Asia.
The most interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us in the geological memoirs of the Earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black earth, many implements of the Neolithic period offairly excellent workmanship, with a few fragments of pottery—possibly traceable to the era of the Roman colonization. There is no trace of Palæolithic man here. No flints or traces of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the black mould into the red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat, things assume a very different aspect.Not one implementfit to bear comparison with thefinely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratumis to be seen; only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to think?) and scrapers of the Palæolithic age, mixed up confusedly with[pg 765]the bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above! In all cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Palæolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism—in Europe again. We are made also to face the“Mammoth age”—the extreme or earliest division of the Palæolithic age—in which the great rudeness of implements reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such as the Neanderthal, points to a very low type of humanity. But they may sometimes point also to something else; to a race of men quite distinct from our (Fifth Race) Humanity.
As said by an Anthropologist inModern Thought:
The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707
The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrère may be considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca, Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognized that the lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race, excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans,should be placed apart. The fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are generally united by suture, places theHomo aferon the level of being as good a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of the world, of this race is peculiar. It hasnever originated a system of architecture or a religion of its own.1707
It is peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it may be,fossilman in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of man on this Earth, nor the age of his earliest civilizations.
It is time that the Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy guns of the satire of the men of Science as much as the pop-guns of the profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof, while their theories can stand the test better than can the hypotheses of the Scientists, at any rate. As to the proof of the antiquity which they claim for man, they have Darwin himself and Lyell with them. The latter confesses that they, the Naturalists—
Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708
Have already obtained evidence of the existence of man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, andthis even before the era of the earliesthistorical records.1708
This is a statement made by one of England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by students of Occultism, for with all others he says:
In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.
In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages during which he [man] must have flourished on earth,there is no proof of any perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a far more distant epoch,possibly on some continents or islands now submergedbeneath the ocean.
Thus lost continents are officially suspected. That worlds, and also races, are periodically destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and are periodically renewed, is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldæans, all antiquity, believed in this. Twice already has the face of the Globe been changed by fire, and twice by water, since man appeared on it. As land needs rest and renovation, new forces, and a change for its soil, so does water. Thence arises a periodical redistribution of land and water, change of climates, etc., all brought on by geological revolution, and ending in a final change in the axis of the Earth. Astronomers may pooh-pooh the idea of a periodical change in the behaviour of the Globe's axis, and smile at the conversation given in theBook of Enochbetween Noah and his“grandfather”Enoch; the allegory is, nevertheless, a geological and an astronomical fact. There is a secular change in the inclination of the Earth's axis, and its appointed time is recorded in one of the great Secret Cycles. As in many other questions, Science is gradually moving toward our way of thinking. Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., F.G.S., writes in thePopular Science Review:
If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709
If it be necessary to call in extra-mundane causes to explain the great increase of ice at this glacial period, I would prefer the theory propounded by Dr. Robert Hooke in 1688; since, by Sir Richard Phillips and others; and lastly by Mr. Thomas Belt, C.E., F.G.S.; namely, a slight increase in the present obliquity of the ecliptic, a proposal in perfect accord with other known astronomical facts, and the introduction of which involves no disturbance of the harmony which is essential to our cosmical condition as a unit in the great solar system.1709
The following, quoted from a Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S., delivered in March, 1885, on“The Extinct Lake of Bovey Tracey,”shows the hesitation, in the face of every evidence in favour of Atlantis, to accept the fact.
Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)
Evergreen figs, laurels, palms, and ferns having gigantic rhizomes have their existing congenersin a sub-tropical climate, such, it cannot be doubted, as prevailed in[pg 767]Devonshire in Miocene times, and are thus calculated to suggest caution when thepresent climateof any district is regarded as normal.
When, moreover, Miocene plants are found in Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland, lying between 69° 20´ and 70° 30´ N. lat.; when we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia couttsiæ, Quercus lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that“the‘splendid evergreen’(Magnolia inglefieldi)‘ripened its fruits so far north as on the parallel of 70°’”(Phil. Trans., clix. 457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far, some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be dismissed apparently with the feeling that thetime for its solution has not yet arrived.
It seems to be admitted on all hands that the Miocene plants of Europe have their nearest and most numerous existing analogues in North America, and hence arises the question: How was the migration from one area to the other effected? Was there, as some have believed, an Atlantis?—a continent, or an archipelago of large islands, occupying the area of the North Atlantic. There is perhaps nothing unphilosophical in this hypothesis; for since, as geologists state,“the Alps have acquired 4,000, and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene period”(Lyell'sPrinciples, 11th ed., p. 256, 1872), a Post-Miocene[?] depression might have carried the hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths. But an Atlantis is apparently unnecessary and uncalled for. According to Professor Oliver,“A close and very peculiar analogy subsists between the Flora of Tertiary Central Europe and the recent Floras of the American States and of the Japanese region; an analogy much closer and more intimate than is to be traced between the Tertiary and recent Floras of Europe. We find the Tertiary element of the Old World to be intensified towards its extreme eastern margin, if not in numerical preponderance of genera, yet in features which especially give a character to the Fossil Flora.... This accession of the Tertiary element is rather gradual and not abruptly assumed in the Japan islands only. Although it there attains a maximum, we may trace it from the Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, and Persia ... then along the Himâlaya and through China.... We learn also that during the Tertiary epoch, counterparts of Central European Miocene genera certainly grew in North-West America.... We note further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of the New World.... The consideration of these facts lead me to the opinion that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-Western America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.”(Nat. Hist. Rev., ii. 164, 1862, Art.,“The Atlantis Hypothesis in its Botanical Aspect.”)
See, however, on these points,“Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents.”
But nothing short of a pithecoid man will ever satisfy the luckless[pg 768]searchers after the thrice hypothetical“missing link.”Yet, if beneath the vast floors of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep, no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree remarks, no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the Tertiary strata, if these forms had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they might still have been found—
In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710
In those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea.1710
Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Did not preconceptions fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of TheAntiquity of Manwould have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (to p. 530) and reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This Physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement in bodily structure, for why may notthe soul, or the higher intellectual and moral faculties play the first instead of the second part in a progressive scheme?
This hypothesis is made in relation to evolutionnot being entirely dueto“natural selection”; but it applies as well to the case in hand. For we, too, claim that it is the“Soul,”or the Inner Man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic Astral, the mould on which physical man is gradually built—his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening later on as that physical stature grows and develops.
“Thus incorporeal spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense,”and became the men of the Third and the Fourth Races. Still later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced from what we should call the still gigantic stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half that size at present.
Man is certainlynospecial creation. He is the product of Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution—is[pg 769]the“Eternal Pilgrim,”the Protean differentiation in Space and Time of the One Absolute“Unknowable.”
In hisAntiquity of Man1711Sir Charles Lyell quotes—perhaps in rather a mocking spirit—what Hallam says in hisIntroduction to the Literature of Europe:
If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712
If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both!1712
An Occultist would have put it otherwise. He would say that man was indeed made in the image of a type projected by his progenitor, the creating Angel-Force, or Dhyân Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was madein the image of man, since the framework of the ape, we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means, of the actual form of the Third Round and of the Fourth Round Man as well, later on. Nothing is lost in Nature,not an atom: this is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand thatformshould be equally endowed with permanency.
And yet what do we find? Says Sir William Dawson, F.R.S.:
It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713
It is farther significant that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures (Nature, 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Hæckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown (History of Creation).... The so-called“tallies”found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology.1713
Again, in Dr. C. R. Bree'sFallacies of Darwinism, we read:
Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715
Mr. Darwin justly says that the difference physically and, more especially, mentally, between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is enormous. Therefore,the time—which in Darwinian evolution must be almost inconceivably slow—must have beenenormousalso during man's development from[pg 770]the monkey1714. The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries, must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found! Neither in the gravel, not the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds and gravel and drift, nor in the tertiaries below them, has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the missing families between the monkey and the man, asassumedto have existed by Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that they should not also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata which havenotgone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that some portions should not be dredged from the ocean-bed like the remains of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravel and drift!... The celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote period [bronze and stone ages], and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot, immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape.1715
Our Globe being convulsed each time that itreäwakensfor a new period of activity, like a field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop is thrown into it—it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms—vegetable, animal and human—changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna were utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and in determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia. And, finally, the form of the gigantic ape-man of the former Round has been reproduced in this one by human bestiality, and transfigured into theparentform in the modern anthropoid.
This doctrine, even imperfectly delineated as it is under our inefficient pen, is assuredly more logical, more consistent with facts, andfar moreprobable, than many“scientific”theories; that, for instance, of the first organic germ descending on a meteor to our Earth—like Ain Suph on its Vehicle, Adam Kadmon. Only, the latter descent is allegorical, as every one knows, and the Kabalists have never offered this figure of[pg 771]speech for acceptance in its dead-letter garb. But the germ-in-the-meteor theory, as coming from such high scientific quarters, is an eligible candidate for axiomatic truth and law, a theory people are in honour bound to accept, if they would be on a right level with Modern Science. What the next theory necessitated by the materialistic premisses will be—no one can tell. Meanwhile, thepresenttheories, as anyone can see, clash far more discordantly among themselves than even with those of the Occultists outside the sacred precincts of learning. For what is there, next in order, now that exact Science has made even of the life-principle an empty word, a meaningless term, and insists that life is an effectdue to the molecular action of the primordial protoplasm? The new doctrine of the Darwinists may be defined and summarized in the few words, from Mr. Herbert Spencer: