These secrets [of land and sea] were divulged to the men of the secret science, but not to the geographers.[21]

The claim that physical man was originally a colossal pre-tertiary giant, and that he existed 18,000,000 years ago, must of course appear preposterous to admirers of, and believers in, modern learning. The whole posse comitatus of Biologists will turn away from the conception of this Third Race Titan of the Secondary Age, a being fit to fight successfully with the then gigantic monsters of the air, sea, and land; so his forefathers, the ethereal prototypes of the Atlantean, had little need to fear that which could not hurt them. The modern Anthropologist is quite welcome to laugh at our Titans, as he laughs at the Biblical Adam, and as the Theologian laughs at the former's pithecoid ancestor. The Occultists and their severe critics may feel that they have pretty well mutually squared their accounts by this time. Occult Sciences claim less and give more, at all events, than either Darwinian Anthropology or Biblical Theology.

Nor ought the Esoteric Chronology to frighten anyone; for, with regard to figures, the greatest authorities of the day are as fickle and as uncertain as the Mediterranean waves. As regards the duration of the geological periods alone, the learned men of the Royal Society are all hopelessly at sea, and jump from one million to five hundred millions of years with the utmost ease, as will be seen more than once during this comparison.

Take one instance for our present purpose—the calculations of Mr. Croll. Whether, according to this authority, 2,500,000 years represent the time since the beginning of the Tertiary Age, or the Eocene period, as an American geologist makes him say;[22] or whether again Mr. Croll “allows fifteen millions since the beginning of the Eocene period,” as quoted by an English geologist,[23] both sets of figures cover the claims made by the Secret Doctrine.[24] For assigning as the latter does from four to five million years between the incipient and the final evolution of the Fourth Root-Race, on the Lemuro-Atlantean Continents; one million years for the Fifth, or Âryan Race, to the present date; and about 850,000 since the submersion of the last large peninsula of the great Atlantis—all this may have easily taken place within the 15,000,000 years conceded by Mr. Croll to the Tertiary Age. But, chronologically speaking, the duration of the period is of secondary importance, as we have, after all, certain American Scientists to fall back upon. These gentlemen, unmoved by the fact that their assertions are called not [pg 010] only dubious but absurd, yet maintain that man existed so far back as in the Secondary Age. They have found human footprints on rocks of that formation; and furthermore, M. de Quatrefages finds no valid scientific reason why man should not have existed during the Secondary Age.

The Ages and periods in Geology are, in sober truth, purely conventional terms, as they are still barely delineated, and, moreover, no two Geologists or Naturalists agree as to the figures. Thus, there is a wide margin for choice offered to the Occultist by the learned fraternity. Shall we take for one of our supports Mr. T. Mellard Read? This gentleman, in a paper on “Limestone as an Index of Geological Time,” read by him in 1878 before the Royal Society, claims that the minimum time required for the formation of the sedimentary strata and the elimination of the calcareous matter is in round numbers 600 million years;[25] or shall we ask support for our chronology from Mr. Darwin's works, wherein, according to his theory, he demands for the organic transformations from 300 to 500 million years? Sir Charles Lyell and Prof. Houghton were satisfied with placing the beginning of the Cambrian Age at 200 and 240 millions of years ago, respectively. Geologists and Zoologists claim the maximum time, though Mr. Huxley, at one time, placed the beginning of the incrustation of the earth at 1,000 million years ago, and would not surrender a millennium of it.

But the main point for us lies not in the agreement or disagreement of the Naturalists as to the duration of geological periods, but rather in their perfect accord on one point, for a wonder, and this a very important one. They all agree that during the Miocene Age—whether one or ten million years ago—Greenland and even Spitzbergen, the remnants of our second or Hyperborean Continent, “had an almost tropical climate.” Now the pre-Homeric Greeks had preserved a vivid tradition of this “Land of the Eternal Sun,” whither their Apollo journeyed yearly. Science tells us:

During the Miocene age, Greenland (in N. Lat. 70°) developed an abundance of trees, such as the yew, the redwood, the sequoia, allied to the Californian species, beeches, planes, willows, oaks, poplars and walnuts, as well as a magnolia and a zamia.[26]

In short Greenland had southern plants unknown to northern regions.

And now arises this natural question. If the Greeks, in the days of Homer, knew of a Hyperborean land, i.e., a blessed land beyond the reach of Boreas, the God of winter and of the hurricane, an ideal region which the later Greeks and their writers have vainly tried to locate beyond Scythia, a country where nights were short and days long, and beyond that a land where the Sun never set and the palm grew freely—if they knew of all this, who then told them of it? In their day, and for ages previously, Greenland must certainly have been already covered with perpetual snows, with never-thawing ice, just as it is now. Everything tends to show that the land of the short nights and the long days was Norway or Scandinavia, beyond which was the blessed land of eternal light and summer. For the Greeks to know of this, the tradition must have descended to them from some people more ancient than themselves, who were acquainted with those climatic details of which the Greeks themselves could know nothing. Even in our day, Science suspects that beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, there exists a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green. The Archaic Teachings, and also the Purânas—for one who understands their allegories—contain the same statements. Suffice, then, for us the strong probability that, during the Miocene period of Modern Science, at a time when Greenland was an almost tropical land, there lived a people, now unknown to history.

Note.