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The red Indian tribes of America, only a few years ago comparatively speaking, petitioned the President of the United States to grant them possession of four small lakes, the petition being written on the tiny surface of a piece of a fabric, which is covered with barely a dozen representations of animals and birds. (See Lubbock.) The American savages have a number of such different kinds of writing, but not one of our Scientists is yet familiar, or even knows of the early hieroglyphic cypher, still preserved in some Fraternities, and named in Occultism the Senzar. Moreover, all those who have decided to regard such modes of writing -- e.g., the ideographs of the Red Indians, and even the Chinese characters -- as "attempts of the early races of mankind to express their untutored thoughts," will decidedly object to our statement, that writing was invented by the Atlanteans, and not at all by the Phoenicians. Indeed, such a claim as that writing was known to mankind many hundreds of millenniums ago, in the face of the philologists who have decreed that writing was unknown in the days of, and to Panini, in India, as also to the Greeks in the time of Homer, will be met by general disapprobation, if not with silent scorn. All denial and ridicule notwithstanding, the Occultists will maintain the claim, and simply for this reason: from Bacon down to our modern Royal Society, we have a too long period, full of the most ludicrous mistakes made by Science, to warrant our believing in modern scientific assumptions rather than in the denials of our Teachers. Writing, our scientists say, was unknown to Panini; and this sage nevertheless composed a grammar which contains 3,996 rules, and is the most perfect of all the grammars that were ever made! Panini is made out to have lived barely a few centuries B.C ., by the most liberal; and the rocks in Iran and Central Asia (whence the philologists and historians [[Vol. 2, Page]] 440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. show us the ancestors of the same Panini, the Brahmins, coming into India) are covered with writing, two and three thousand years old (12,000, according to some fearless palaeontologists). Writing was an ars incognita in the days of Hesiod and Homer, agreeably to Grote, and unknown to the Greeks so late as 770 B.C. ; and the Phoenicians who had invented it, and knew writing as far back as 1500 B.C ., at the earliest,* were living among the Greeks, and elbowing them, all the time! All these scientific and contradictory conclusions disappeared, however, into thin air, when Schliemann discovered ( a ) the site of ancient Troy, whose actual existence had been so long regarded as a fable; and ( b ), excavated on that site earthenware vessels with inscriptions in characters unknown to the paleontologists and the all-denying Sanskritists. Who will now deny Troy, or these Archaic inscriptions? As Professor Virchow witnesses: -- "I was myself an eye-witness of two such discoveries, and helped to gather the articles together. The slanderers have long since been silenced, who were not ashamed to charge the discoverer with an imposture."** Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men. Du Chaillu, Gordon-Cumming, Madame Merian,*** Bruce, and a host of others were charged with lying. Madame Merian -- says the author of " Mythical Monsters, " who gives this information in the Introduction -- was accused of deliberate falsehood in reference to her description of a bird-eating spider nearly two hundred years ago. But now-a-days reliable observers have confirmed it in regard to South America, India, and elsewhere. Audubon was accused by botanists of having invented the yellow water-lily, which he figured in his Birds of the South under the name of Nymphaea lutea, and after having lain under the imputation for years, was confirmed at last by the discovery of the long-lost flower in Florida in 1876 ( Pop. Sci. Monthly, No. 60, April 1877). And, as Audubon was called a liar for this, and for his Holiaetus Washingtonii,**** so Victor Hugo was ridiculed for . . . . his marvellous word-painting of the devil-fish, and his description of a man becoming its helpless victim. "The thing was derided as an impossibility; yet within a few years were discovered, on the shores of Newfoundland, cuttle fish with arms extending to thirty feet in length, and capable of dragging a good-sized [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * It is an historical fact that Sanchoniathon compiled and wrote in Phoenician characters -- from annals and State documents in the archives of the older Phoenician cities -- the full record of their religion in 1250 B.C . ** Prof. Virchow, in Appendix I to Schliemann's Ilios . Murray, 1880. *** Gosse writes of the latter: "She is set down a thorough heretic, not at all to be believed, a manufacturer of unsound natural history, an inventor of false facts in science." (" Romance of Natural History ," p. 227.) **** Dr. Cover writes: "That famous bird of Washington was a myth; either Audubon was mistaken, or else, as some do not hesitate to affirm, he lied about it." [[Vol. 2, Page]] 441 A WHOLESALE DENIAL. boat beneath the surface; and their action has been reproduced for centuries past . . . . by Japanese artists." (" Mythical Monsters, " p. 11 Introd .). And if Troy was denied, and regarded as a myth; the existence of Herculaneum and Pompeii declared a fiction; the travels of Marco Polo laughed at and called as absurd a fable as one of Baron Munchausen's tales, why should the writer of "Isis Unveiled" and of the "Secret Doctrine" be any better treated? Mr. Charles Gould, the author of the above-cited volume quotes in his excellent work a few lines from Macmillan (1860), which are as true as life, and too much to the point not to be reproduced: "When a naturalist, either by visiting such spots of earth as are still out of the way, or by his good fortune, finds a very queer plant or animal, he is forthwith accused of inventing his game. . . . . . As soon as the creature is found to sin against preconception, the great (mis ?) guiding Spirit, a priori by name, who furnishes philosophers with their omniscience pro re nata, whispers that no such thing can be, and forthwith there is a charge of hoax. The heavens themselves have been charged with hoaxes.