Lesley.] ^^g [June. 



eyed mountain-land of Persia, and spiritual among the justice-loving 

 seers of Palestine. Before arkism, of course, was universal fetisch- 

 ism, like a great chaos, without law, or any method of self-expres- 

 sion; and after arkism, came all forms of thought and feeling pos- 

 sible for man to invent, but all budding from this Yggdrasil, and 

 bearing flowers and fruit after the pattern of its undying life. 



38. It is not, therefore, in violation of the great canon of modern 

 science, but in obedience to it, that the arkite theory sets up its 

 claims to universality. 



39. What the great event was which so impressed the worshipful 

 mind of the human race, or whether the chronic relationships of 

 mankind in the earlier stages of their existence to mountains, or firm 

 land in general, to boats, rafts, or stationary cra"nnoges, and to all 

 waters in general, may not compensate for the doubt which physical 

 science cannot help throwing over the story of a Noachian deluge, — 

 it will be hard to demonstrate. Geological investigation has as yet 

 discovered no traces of a real event, such as is described in Mosaic 

 and other records of the barbarous ages of the world. That science, 

 however, has long taught the alternate submergence and eraergence- 

 of dry land ; and all its latest teachings are of the extreme antiquity 

 of human life upon the earth, and of man's contemporaneous existence 

 with other now extinct animals, during a glacial epoch, involving 

 probably great floods, and opening into the comparatively modern 

 age at the beginning of which men lived upon the waters, instead of 

 on the land. The Arkite theory has nothing to say on these matters. 

 It starts from a given point, the already established worship of the 

 mountain, ship, and flood, without explaining how this worship was 

 begotten ; only denying that it was developed intellectually out of 

 Fetischism, Ophism, Mithraism, Phallisra, or any other known myth- 

 ology ; and afiirming on the contrary, that it explains and embraces 

 them. 



Pending nominations, Nos. 534 to 539, and new nomina- 

 tion 540, were read. 



And the Society was adjourned. 



