56 



NA TURE 



[Nov. 20, 1 1 



repeating themselves then start afresh into growth, and rise 

 rapidly, through intermediate, to the higher forms. The 

 spiral character of the progress, and the fact that the tide 

 of life passes from planet to planet in gushes, accounts 

 for the gaps in the various kingdoms of Nature. Each 

 time a spiritual monad arrives on a planet it has a com- 

 plicated process of evolution to perform. It is many 

 times incarnated before it passes onward, and man has 

 many incarnations in each great race, the normal sum 

 being not far short of 800, with an interval of at least 1 500 

 years between each, spent in the " world of effects, or heaven 

 of ordinary theology." In the first planetary round man 

 inhabited an immense but loosely organised body, and 

 could not be called intellectual. In the second he 

 becomes of firmer body, whilst in the third he is rather 

 in form of a giant ape than true man, yet of concrete 

 body and advanced intelligence. In the fourth, the pre- 

 sent round, his intellect becomes fully developed, and he 

 achieves enormous progress. We now approach the 

 transcendental mystery of mysteries, our future develop- 

 ment. The fifth round will be occupied with a struggle be- 

 tween physical intellect and spirituality. In the sixth round 

 a state of perfection of body and soul will be attained 

 which can hardly even be imagined ; while as to the seventh 

 round the occult teachers themselves are solemnly silent, 

 it being altogether too God-like for realisation. At the 

 end of each planetary round an intercyclic period of ex- 

 traordinary exaltation must be undergone. It is by pro- 

 cesses of occult training that adepts project themselves 

 precociously into the fifth round, or possess themselves of 

 the attributes of fifth-round men, so as to be able to 

 explore the mysteries of Nature and of other states of 

 existence, and to assimilate knowledge by clairvoyance 

 independently of observation. 



We now exist in the fifth race of the fourth round. The first 

 and second races developed no civilisation, but the third 

 and fourth did do so several millions of years ago, though 

 no traces of such now exist. The periods of the great 

 root raees are divided by vast convulsions or geological 

 changes,-which cut them off at the appointed time, leaving 

 only a few-survivors behind, who rapidly relapse into bar- 

 barism. The fourth race lived on "Atlantis," and reached 

 its apogee in "the Eocene Age," when this great con- 

 tinent showed the first symptoms of sinking, a process 

 that occupied it down to 11,446 years ago, when its last 

 island, Poseidonis, went down with a crash. "Lemuria" 

 was drowned with its high civilisation and gods about 

 700,000 years earlier than Atlantis, or just before the early 

 part of the Eocene Age, the relics of its third-race in- 

 habitants existing in some of the flat-headed aborigines of 

 Australia. The true Chinaman is interesting as a relic of 

 the fourth race. The civilisations of the ante-Glacial period 

 were superior to those of Greece and Rome, or the 

 Egyptian, which was in its decadence 12,000 years ago. 

 The uninhabited Arctic regions will prove not only to 

 have enjoyed a tropical climate, but were likewise the 

 seat of one of the most ancient civilisations of the fourth 

 race. Atlantis belonged to the Miocene times, and the 

 cataclysm which destroyed it came at the appointed time, 

 " otherwise it would be impossible for the best seer to 

 calculate the exact hour and year when such cataclysms 

 great and small have to occur." The relics of these 

 former civilisations are hidden in strata which have never 

 been geologically explored, deep in the unfathomed ocean 

 beds. 



An important part of the Buddhist creed is the belief 

 in the alternation of periods of repose with periods of 

 activity. As man sleeps every twenty-four hours, and 

 vegetation subsides and revives with the seasons, so rest 

 periods follow each incarnation. The tide-wave of 

 humanity flows on to each of the seven planets seven 

 times, and passes through its seven races and ebbs away 

 again, but the great rest period of our planetary chain 

 does not begin until the seventh round of humanity is 



perfected. At an incalculably remote period the whole 

 of the seven planetary chains of our solar system will 

 pass into a period of rest, and finally the whole universe 

 itself will have its great cosmic night. After the long 

 night of a planetary chain the animal and vegetable world 

 resume their arrested activity, but when the time arrives 

 for all the planetary chains of our system to pass into 

 their night, each planet, as the seventh-round man quits 

 it, is annihilated instead of merely becoming invisible, 

 and there is an outflow from every kingdom of its entities. 

 These will rest in lethargic sleep in space until brought 

 into life again at the next solar period, and will then form 

 the soul of the future globe. We have every indication 

 that at this very moment such a solar night is taking 

 place, while there are two minor ones ending somewhere. 

 At the beginning of the next solar day period the hitherto 

 subjective elements of the material worlds, now scattered 

 in cosmic dust, will form into primordial ripples of life, 

 and, separating into differentiating centres of activity, 

 combine in a graduated scale of seven stages of evolution. 

 Every orb will pass through seven stages of density, until 

 its solidification and desiccation at last reach a point 

 when it becomes a relaxed conglomerate, and its con- 

 stituent masses cease to obey the laws of cohesion which 

 hold them together. 



Evolution takes its rise in the atomic polarity which 

 motion engenders. In cosmogony the active and passive 

 forces correspond to the male and female principles. The 

 attribute of the universal spiritual principle is to expand 

 and shed, of the material principle to gather and fecun- 

 date. These become consciousness and life when brought 

 together. Our planet, like an iceberg, is merely a state 

 of being for a given time, and its present appearance, 

 geological and anthropological, is but transitory and will 

 pass away. 



Such are the beliefs and doctrines concerning evolution ' 

 held by the Oriental scholar, w-ho holds in pity the benighted 

 ignorance of Western so-called science. The book from 

 which they are gathered is sober earnest, and I am 

 asked whether the Buddhist ideas on evolution are in 

 accord with the discoveries of science. The mere state- 

 ment of the belief, shorn of its mysticism, is a sufficient 

 answer. The importance attached to the numeral 7 

 seems puerile, and its reason is not easy to discover ; it is 

 claimed that the colours of the spectrum and the notes of 

 the musical scale are seven, and that there are seven king- 

 doms in Nature. There is one seeming scientific fact, 

 however, which, though it has escaped the "adepts," 

 favours so far the belief in evolution by gushes, and is still 

 unexplained. The first appearance of many forms of life 

 on our planet, it is well known, is very sudden. All the 

 groups of Mollusca, and especially in the case of Am- 

 monites, appear at once fully developed and in great 

 variety of species, and never develop into anything higher. 

 So with the Echinodermata, the Crustacea, Insecta, the 

 different orders of fishes, many orders of reptiles, mar- 

 supials, ferns, and dicotyledons. All these seem to have 

 been evolutionised in a very sudden manner, and as yet 

 afford no grounds for controverting the Buddhist belief 

 that they are well developed arrivals from other planets. 

 J. Starkie Gardner 



THE RAINFALL OF 1884 

 'THE water famine with which the towns of Manchester 

 -*- and Bradford have recently been threatened has 

 served to draw public attention to the fact that the rain- 

 fall of the present year has been strikingly deficient. As 

 the extent of the deficiency is, however, little, or at the 

 best imperfectly, realised, a few reliable statistics on the 

 subject may be of more than ordinary interest. 



The following table shows, for seventeen places situated 



1 Condensed from Mr. A. P. Sinnett's book, " Esoteric Buddhism "(Triibner 

 and Co.), and as far as possible in his own words. 



