The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants—themselves smaller than their ancestors the Mastodons—and hippopotami, are the only surviving relics, and tend to disappear more entirely every day. But even they have already had a few pioneers of their future genus, [pg 230] and have decreased in size in the same proportion as men have done. For the remains of a pigmy elephant, E. Falconeri, were found in the cave deposits of Malta; and the same author asserts that they were associated with the remains of pigmy hippopotami, the former being only two feet six inches high. There is also the still existing Hippopotamus (Chœropsis) Liberiensis, “which M. Milne-Edwards figures as little more than two feet in height.”[507]
Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy-tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that:
The things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically speaking, to the things that are unknown.[508]
Thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.
The “Sons Of God” And The “Sacred Island.”
The “legend” given in Isis Unveiled[509] in relation to a portion of the globe which Science now concedes to have been the cradle of humanity—though it was but one of the seven cradles, in truth—runs as follows:
Tradition says, and the records of the Great Book (the Book of Dzyan) explain, that long before the days of Ad-am, and his inquisitive wife, He-va, where now are found but salt lakes and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himâlayan range, and its western prolongation. In it an island, which, for its unparalleled beauty, had no rival in the world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the Race which preceded ours.
“The last remnant” means the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” who, with a few tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it was the Third Race, inhabiting the great Lemurian Continent, which preceded the veritable and complete human Races—the Fourth and the Fifth. Therefore was it said in Isis Unveiled that:
This race could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited control over the elements. These were the “Sons of God”; not those who saw the daughters of men, but the real Elohim, though in the oriental Kabalah they have another name. It was they who imparted Nature's most weird secrets to men, and revealed to them the ineffable, and now lost “word.”