This is Mr. Bentley's misfortune, and does not take away from the glory of the ancient Hindû Astronomers, who were all Initiates.
Having given a number of illustrations from natural history, the doctor adds: “The facts I have briefly glanced at are general facts, and cannot happen day after day in so many millions of animals of every kind. from the larva or ovum of a minute insect up to man, at definite periods, from a mere chance or coincidence.... Upon the whole it is, I think, impossible to come to any less general conclusion than this, that, in animals, changes occur every three and a half, seven, fourteen, twenty-one, or twenty-eight days, or at some definite number of weeks”—or septenary cycles. Again, the same Dr. Laycock states that: “Whatever type the fever may exhibit, there will be a paroxysm on the seventh day.... fourteenth will be remarkable as a day of amendment ... [either cure or death taking place]. If the fourth [paroxysm] be severe, and the fifth less so, the disease will end at the seventh paroxysm, and ... the change for the better ... will be seen on the fourteenth day ... namely, about three or four o'clock a.m., when the system is most languid.” (Approaching End of the Age, by Grattan Guinness, pp. 258 to 269, wherein this is quoted).
This is pure “soothsaying” by cyclic calculations, and it is connected with Chaldæan Astrolatry and Astrology. Thus Materialistic Science—in its medicine, the most materialistic of all—applies our Occult laws to diseases, studies natural history with its help, recognizes its presence as a fact in Nature, and yet must needs pooh-pooh the same archaic knowledge when claimed by the Occultists. For if the mysterious Septenary Cycle is a law in Nature, and it is one, as proven; if it is found controlling both evolution and involution (or death) in the realms of entomology, ichthyology and ornithology, as in the kingdom of the animal mammalia and man—why cannot it be present and acting in Kosmos, in general, in its natural (though occult) divisions of time, races, and mental development? And why, furthermore, should not the most ancient Adepts have studied and thoroughly mastered these cyclic laws under all their aspects? Indeed, Dr. Stratton states as a physiological and pathological fact, that “in health the human pulse is more frequent in the morning than in the evening for six days out of seven; and that on the seventh day it is slower.” (Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Jan. 1843; ibid., loc. cit.) Why, then, should not an Occultist show the same in cosmic and terrestrial life in the pulse of the Planet and Races? Dr. Laycock divides life by three great septenary periods; the first and last, each stretching over 21 years, and the central period or prime of life lasting 28 years, or four times seven. He subdivides the first into seven distinct stages, and the other two into three minor periods, and says that: “The fundamental unit of the greater periods is one week of seven days, each day being twelve hours, and that single and compound multiples of this unit, determine the length of these periods by the same ratio, as multiples of the unit of twelve hours determine the lesser periods. This law binds all periodic vital phenomena together, and links the periods observed in the lowest annulose animals, with those of man himself, the highest of the vertebrata.” (Ibid., p. 267.) If Science does this, why should she scorn the Occult information, that—to use Dr. Laycock's language—one Week of the Manvantaric (Lunar) Fortnight, of fourteen Days (or seven Manus), that Fortnight of twelve Hours in a Day representing seven Periods or seven Races—is now passed? This language of Science fits our Doctrine admirably. Mankind has lived over “a week of seven days, each day being twelve hours,” since three and a half Races are now gone for ever, the Fourth is submerged, and we are now in the Fifth Race.
The mental barrier between man and ape, characterized by Huxley as an “enormous gap, a distance practically immeasurable” (! !) is, indeed, in itself conclusive. Certainly it constitutes a standing puzzle to the Materialist, who relies on the frail reed of “natural selection.” The physiological differences between Man and the Apes are in reality—despite a curious community of certain features—equally striking. Says Dr. Schweinfurth, one of the most cautious and experienced of Naturalists:
“In modern times there are no animals in creation that have attracted a larger amount of attention from the scientific student of nature than these great quadrumana [the anthropoids], which are stamped with such a singular resemblance to the human form as to have justified the epithet of anthropomorphic.... But all investigation at present only leads human intelligence to a confession of its insufficiency; and nowhere is caution more to be advocated, nowhere is premature judgment more to be deprecated than in the attempt to bridge over the mysterious chasm which separates man and beast.” (Heart of Africa, i., 520. Ed., 1873.)
“At this period,” writes Darwin, “the arteries run in arch-like branches, as if to carry the blood to branchiæ which are not present in the higher vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck still remain, marking their former [?] position.”
It is noteworthy that, though gill-clefts are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes, etc., their appearance is regularly noted in the fœtal development of vertebrates. Even children are occasionally born with an opening in the neck corresponding to one of the clefts.
We confess to not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. E. Clodd's positive statement in Knowledge. Speaking of the men of Neolithic times, “concerning whom Mr. Grant Allen has given ... a vivid and accurate sketch,” and who are “the direct ancestors of peoples of whom remnants yet lurk in out-of-the-way corners of Europe, where they have been squeezed or stranded,” he adds, “but the men of Palæolithic times can be identified with no existing races; they were savages of a more degraded type than any extant; tall, yet barely erect, with short legs and twisted knees, with prognathous, that is, projecting ape-like jaws, and small brains. Whence they come we cannot tell, and their ‘grave knoweth no man to this day.’ ”
Besides the possibility that there may be men who know whence they came and how they perished—it is not true to say that the Palæolithic men, or their fossils, are all found with “small brains.” The oldest skull of all those hitherto found, the “Neanderthal skull,” is of average capacity, and Mr. Huxley was compelled to confess that it was no real approximation whatever to that of the “missing link.” There are aboriginal tribes in India whose brains are far smaller and nearer to that of the ape than any hitherto found among the skulls of Palæolithic man.
Since no single atom in the entire Kosmos is without life and consciousness, how much more then must its mighty globes be filled with both—though they remain sealed books to us men who can hardly enter even into the consciousness of the forms of life nearest us?