The same writer, Comyns Beaumont, concludes his article on the ancient Peruvians in the issue for June 27, and says that:
Central America, as the "Enterprise" or "Easter Divide," a large submarine ridge, indicates, was connected to the Pacific Continent. On the other side Central America was connected in the East with the Mediterranean by another continental mass that spread across the Atlantic Ocean, and of which today the Antilles, Azores, Canaries, and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco are the existing remains. Peru also was a member of this vast continental system. Apart from the evidence of geological strata, confirmation of this is obtained from the study of sea fauna. The marine deposits of Peru, Chile, and Ecuador belong to the same genus as those of Central America, and to find the corresponding genus elsewhere one must search in the Mediterranean. Precisely, therefore, as Europe, Asia, and Africa possess a continuous land connexion, at the epoch when the Peruvians were in the forefront of civilization there existed a world which comprised the regions of the Mediterranean (then very different from nowadays), the lost Atlantic Continent, Central America, and Peru, and the lost Pacific Continent which embraced lands not only in the Pacific Ocean, but continued to where the Indian Ocean now washes the shores of Africa, India, and Mesopotamia.
Thus a step is made in the fulfilment of H. P. Blavatsky's prophecy that the present century would witness a recognition of many of the teachings she outlined in her writings.
But there is still much to be done. And not the least important point is to distinguish carefully between the "Sons of Light" and the "Sorcerers" among the mighty men of these perished lands. There was a true Wisdom and a false knowledge; and H. P. Blavatsky never fails to discriminate between those who preserved the light and those who fell into darkness. The Easter Island statues, for instance, she describes as resembling the sensual type of the Atlantean sorcerers rather than that of the "Buddhas" (so-called) of the Bamian colossi. The writer in the Times Supplement calls the Easter Island statues "Turanian," employing thereby such familiar classifications as he finds to hand; and in any case he distinguishes them from that higher type loosely designated by the term "Aryan." This "Turanian" type he finds also in Chaldaea, India, Central America, etc., and alludes to their habit of building pyramids.
Finally he shows how inadequate are the speculations of many anthropologists as to the antiquity of man. Human bones disintegrate after a comparatively short time; so that the few we find are such as have been accidentally preserved. And these ancient civilizations tend to disprove the conventional theories of human evolution—which theories, however, change from year to year.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF FOLK-MUSIC, as Exemplified in the Welsh National Melodies: by Kenneth Morris
GREAT attention is being paid nowadays to the collecting of old folk-songs in such countries as Ireland, Wales, and England; and there has been much discussion raised as to the nature and origin of a folk-song, properly so called. The subject is one of considerable interest, because it leads one to a point where the known and visible things melt away, and forces and influences of a deeper nature are at work. These may be called spiritual and formative; there is a hand guiding, but no one can see any hand; there is a creative mind at function, but it is not the mind of any human being.
In Wales one can still see the genuine folk-song coming into being; one can still watch, more or less, the processes incidental to its birth. In that country, poetry was never held to be a mere string of words that you could repeat as if you were reading an article from the newspaper; conversational methods of utterance are kept for conversation, or for the lower levels of prose, and there is a peculiar chant used for verse. The poem is born with a music of its own; and if it have no such music innate in it, and inseparable from its words, then for all its rhymes and scansion it is no poetry. So in speaking their poems the bards give full value to this music, using a kind of chant which is called "hwyl." The word means simply "sail"; the idea being that the inner music of the poem swells and extends and drives along the words, as the wind will fill and drive the sails of a ship. The method is perfectly natural; the least introduction of artificiality into it is absolutely damning: there you would get the desolating thump, thump, thump, of the motor boat instead of the free flow of the winds of heaven.