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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 the time for its solution has not yet arrived. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 727 NO "MISSING LINK" ANYWHERE. "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's Principles, 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. . . . 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 Himalaya 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 leads 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.) See, however, "Scientific and Geological Proofs of the Reality of Several Submerged Continents." But nothing short of a pithecoid man, will ever satisfy the luckless 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 (" Fallacies of Darwinism ") , no missing links between man and ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the tertiaries, if they had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they [[Vol. 2, Page]] 728 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. might still be found "in those beds of contemporary geological strata which have not gone down to the bottom of the sea." Yet they are as fatally absent from the latter as from the former. Were not preconceptions to fasten vampire-like on man's mind, the author of " Antiquity of Man " would have found a clue to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (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 not the 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 Evolution not being entirely due to " natural selection "; but it applies as well to our 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 the still gigantic (in our modern sense) stature of their primeval ancestors, to about half of that size at present. Man is certainly no special creation, and 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 the "Eternal Pilgrim," the Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute "unknowable." In his "Antiquity of Man," Sir C. Lyell quotes -- perhaps in rather a mocking spirit -- what Hallam says (in Vol. iv., p. 162) in his " Introduction 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 forest of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both?" 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 Dhyan Chohan; while the wanderer of the forest of Sumatra was made in the image of man, since the frame- [[Vol. 2, Page]] 729 PALAEOLITHIC MAN, A CALIGRAPH! work 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 latter is at least certain on scientific data. Analogy would appear to demand that form should be equally endowed with permanency.