Mediaevalism, and with our modern era.  I do not know of any other theory that claims to explain the perpetual and rhythmical fluctuations of history, as violent in their degree as they are approximately regular in their rhythm.

Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life, instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy, stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction.  Geology records this process in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other species.  Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the carboniferous era.  So there are races of men today, amongst others the pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in a certain degree to the dominant races of the world, whom large-hearted optimists regard as stages of retarded development, capable, under tutelage, of advance to a level with the Caucasian, but who, in this view of the case, would be but the weakening product of the “dying fall” of the energy that produced the Greek, the Semite and the Nordic stocks.

So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has passed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its achievement.  In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as passed stages of growth, become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved, and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged.

Granting this theory, the search for the “missing link,” whether in the geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always been.  Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed remnants of the