How was the circulation carried on in this organ?
On the next page he says:
Nothing is at present known respecting the use of digestion in the fœtus.
And respecting its nutrition, he propounds this query:
What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the fœtus? Physiological works contain only vague conjectures on this point.
“Ah, but,” the sceptic may urge, “Magendie's book belongs to the last generation, and Science has since made such strides that his stigma of ignorance can no longer be fixed upon the profession.” Indeed; then let us turn to a very great authority upon Physiology, viz., Sir Michael Foster, and, to the disadvantage of Modern Science, we shall find him saying:
Concerning the rise and development of the functional activities of the embryo, our knowledge is almost a blank. We know scarcely anything about the various steps by which the primary fundamental qualities of the protoplasm of the ovum are differentiated into the complex phenomena which we have attempted in this book to explain.[308]
The students of Trin. Coll. Cantab, will now kindly draw a veil before the statue of Hygieia and bandage the eyes of the busts of Galen and Hippocrates, lest they look reproachfully at their degenerate descendants. One further fact we must note. Sir Michael Foster is discreetly silent about the case of the ruptured umbilical cord cited by his great French confrère.
(b) This is a very curious statement as explained in the Commentaries. To make it clear: The First Race having created the Second by “budding,” as explained above, the Second Race gives birth to the Third—which itself is separated into three distinct divisions, consisting of men differently procreated. The first two of these are produced by an oviparous method, presumably unknown to modern Natural History. While the early sub-races of the Third Humanity procreated their species by a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which coalescing formed an oviform ball—or shall we say egg—that served as an extraneous vehicle for the generation therein of a fœtus and child, the mode of procreation by the later sub-races changed, in its results at all events. The little ones of the earlier sub-races were entirely sexless—shapeless even for all one knows;[309] but those of the later sub-races were born androgynous. It is in the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously a-sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally the man-bearing Eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women. And now let us search for corroboration of these statements in the religious legends of East and West. Let us take the “Egg-born Race” first. Think of Kashyapa, the Vedic sage, and the most prolific of creators. He was the son of Marichi, Brahmâ's Mind-born Son; and he is made to become the father of the Nâgas, or Serpents, among other beings. Exoterically, the Nâgas are semi-divine beings which have a human face and the tail of a serpent. Yet there was a race of Nâgas, said to be a thousand in number only, born or rather sprung [pg 141] from Kadrû, Kashyapa's wife, for the purpose of peopling Pâtâla, which is undeniably America, as will be shown; and there was a Nâga-Dvîpa, one of the seven divisions of Bhâratavarsha, India, inhabited by a people bearing the same name, who are allowed, even by some Orientalists, to be historical, and to have left many a trace behind them to this day.
Now the point most insisted upon at present is that, whatever origin be claimed for man, his evolution took place in this order: (1) sexless, as all the earlier forms are; (2) then, by a natural transition, he became a “solitary hermaphrodite,” a bi-sexual being; and (3) finally separated and became what he is now. Science teaches us that all the primitive forms, though sexless, “still retained the power of undergoing the processes of a-sexual multiplication”; why, then, should man be excluded from that law of Nature? Bi-sexual reproduction is an evolution, a specialized and perfected form on the scale of Matter of the fissiparous act of reproduction. Occult teachings are preëminently panspermic, and the early history of humanity is hidden only “from ordinary mortals”; nor is the history of the primitive Races buried for the Initiates in the tomb of time, as it is for profane Science. Therefore, supported on the one hand by that Science which shows us progressive development and an internal cause for every external modification, as a law in Nature; and, on the other hand, by an implicit faith in the Wisdom—we may say Pansophia even—of the universal traditions gathered and preserved by the Initiates, who have perfected them into an almost faultless system—thus supported, we venture to state the doctrine clearly.