Page 92 (part 3)

Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding Eocene, if they prefer to do so; let them even trace both Man and Dryopithecus to a common ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has, nevertheless, to be faced that in Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are as conspicuous by their absence, as is the fabulous pithecanthropus of Haeckel. Is an exit out of this cul de sac to be found by an appeal to the "unknown," and a reference with Darwin to the "imperfection of the geological record"? So be it; but the same right of appeal must be accorded equally to the Occultists, instead of remaining the monopoly of puzzled materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary Age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a period when the Haeckelian man-ape is conceived to have roamed through the primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen's putative ancestor to have swung himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean giants, " blurred copies " of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man (Huxley), now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist of European Science. Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western Africa, some in Southern Asia, others, again, believe in an independent origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a Simian ancestry (Vogt). Haeckel, however, advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his "prosimiae" . . . "the ancestor common to all other catarrhini, including man" -- a "link" now, however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries! -- he endeavours to find a habitat for the primeval Pithecanthropus alalus. "In all probability it (the transformation of animal into man) occurred in Southern Asia, in which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original home of the different species of men. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but L EMURIA, a continent that lay to the south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. ( Vide infra, "Scientific and geological proofs of the former existence of several [[Vol. 2, Page]] 680 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. submerged continents.") "The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid apes into apelike men took place was probably the last part of the tertiary period, the Pliocene Age, and perhaps the Miocene, its forerunner." (Pedigree of Man, p. 73.) Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to Lemuria, which was the cradle of mankind -- of the physical sexual creature who materialized through long aeons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Haeckel the " dumb ape-men ," just removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait-statues, some of which are now in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Haeckelian doctrines "abominable, revolutionary, immoral" -- though materialism is the legitimate outcome of the ape-ancestor myth -- they are simply too absurd to demand disproof. ------- B . W ESTERN E VOLUTIONISM: T HE C OMPARATIVE A NATOMY OF M AN AND THE A NTHROPOID IN N O W AY A C ONFIRMATION OF D ARWINISM. We are told that while every other heresy against modern science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to Man, will be the one "unpardonable" sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and the man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same. Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Ramayana, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanuman, the monkey-God, "whose feats were great and Wisdom never rivalled," must have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Haeckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes were written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new whatever given to the world or to philosophy, in such volumes as Mivart's "Man and Apes," or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley's defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man's descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one -- we are told -- if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we are called upon to explain the reason of: -- (I.) The similarity of structure between the two; the fact that the [[Vol. 2, Page 681]] HUXLEY CALLS THE DARWINISTS TO ORDER. higher animal world -- man and beast -- is physically of one type or pattern. (II.) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e. , traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except for a semi-animal, semi-arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in Man those "rudimentary" organs (as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the Apteryx of Australia), the vermiform appendix of the coecum, the ear muscles,* the "rudimentary tail" (with which children are still sometimes born), etc., etc.? Such is the war cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the scientific Evolutionists themselves! Furthermore, the latter themselves -- with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others -- while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of science as the above-named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity.