92 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



knowledge and ingenuity of civilisation, did a lot to raise its 

 honour, chivalry, and justice, and to foster and preserve its 

 arts from destruction, if not to create others. So from this 

 onward, to the end of the Epoch of Hope, which is to end some- 

 where between 2000 A.D. to 3000 A.D., Woman, with the aid of 

 Love, Sympathy and Religion is to conquer her relentless 

 spouse man, so we may consider this as the special Epoch of 

 God the Mother and the Epoch of Faith as the Epoch of God 

 the Father. 



Now I may as well mention that the Age of Adam and the 

 Age of Abel, which correspond to the end of the Epoch of 

 Faith and the commencement of the Epoch of Hope, and 

 represents the Stick Age of Evolution, consequently all indica- 

 tions of the formation and evolution of the mind of man at 

 this period can only be arrived at by inverse logical deduction, 

 that is, arguing from effect back to cause. 



Subsequently the creation of rough and smooth stone 

 weapons, the invention of which during this Eighth Day, 

 the Age of Cain, made him a murderer for the first one to two 

 hundred thousand years of the Epoch of Hope till Lamech 

 and Tubal Cain, who are the Biblical personifications of the 

 Bronze age, mark the next stage of evolution. So the Bible 

 informs us that " Lamech said to his wives Ada and Sella : 

 ' Hear my voice ye wives of Lamech, harken to my speech : 

 for I have slain a man to the wounding of myself. . . . 

 Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on Cain, but for Lamech 

 seven times sevenfold. 1 ' This has been truly carried out, for 

 religious wars and iron tools have intensified murder seven 

 times sevenfold, and the curse is not yet complete and will 

 not be over till we abolish international warfare. But as 

 already pointed out, during the early periods of this epoch we 

 have to rely entirely upon conception and conjecture to connect 

 the course of evolution so as to compare it with my hypothesis, 

 which must be one of my excuses to my scientific readers for 

 disregarding all the rules of court. For I am here compelled 

 to draw largely on inverse deduction to fill in the gaps in 

 evolution. I have already demonstrated how the breaking 

 of a stick probably led to mankind's first advancement in 

 developing the powers of imagination, but it may be wise to 

 point out the meaning of the statement of the Bible as regards 

 Eve and the apple. I take this to be a mythical account that 



