Thus much we should have gained ... all the nine perfect organic beings ... [are] formed according to an archetype which merely fluctuates more or less in its very persistent parts and, moreover, day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of reproduction.
This is a seemingly imperfect foreshadowing of the Occult fact of the differentiation of species from the primal astral Root-Types. Whatever the whole posse comitatus of “natural selection,” etc., may effect, the fundamental unity of structural plan remains practically unaffected by all subsequent modifications. The “unity of type” common, in a sense, to all the animal and human kingdoms, is not, as Spencer and others appear to hold, a proof of the consanguinity of all organic forms, but a witness to the essential unity of the “ground-plan” Nature has followed in fashioning her creatures.
To sum up the case we may again avail ourselves of a tabulation of the actual factors concerned in the differentiation of species. The stages of the process itself need no further comment here, for they follow the basic principles underlying organic development, and we do not need to enter on the domain of the biological specialist.
Factors Concerned in the Origin of Species, Animal and Vegetable.
Basic astral prototypes pass into the physical, the Dhyân-Chohanic impulse, constituting Lamarck's “inherent and necessary” law of development. It lies behind all minor agencies: variation transmitted by Heredity, Natural Selection, Sexual Selection Physiological Selection, Isolation. Correlation of Growth, Adaptation to Environment. (Intelligent as opposed to Mechanical Causation.)
B. The European Palæolithic Races: Whence, And How Distributed.
Is Science opposed to those who maintain that, down to the Quaternary period, the distribution of the human races was widely different from what it is now? Is Science against those who, further, maintain that the fossil men found in Europe-although they have almost reached a plane of sameness and unity which continues till this day, regarded [pg 780] from the fundamental physiological and anthropological aspects—still differ, sometimes greatly, from the type of the now existing populations? The late M. Littré admits this in an article published by him in the Revue des Deux Mondes (March 1st, 1859) on the Mémoire called Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes by Boucher de Perthes (1849). Littré therein states that: (a) in these periods when the mammoths, exhumed in Picardy in company with man-made hatchets, lived in the latter region, there must have been an eternal spring reigning over all the terrestrial globe;[1723] nature was the contrary of what it is now, and thus is left an enormous margin for the antiquity of those “periods”; he then adds (b):
Spring, Professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Liège, found in a grotto near Namur, in the mountain of Chauvaux, numerous human bones “of a race quite distinct from ours.”
Skulls exhumed in Austria offer a great analogy with those of negro races in Africa, according to Littré, while others, discovered on the shores of the Danube and the Rhine, resemble the skulls of the Caribs and of the ancient inhabitants of Peru and Chili. Still, the Deluge, whether Biblical or Atlantean, is denied. But further geological discoveries made Gaudry write conclusively: