This is a concrete statement of physical fact at which the Western student protests.  If in the whole range of Western astronomical science there is any one fact that he has accepted as absolutely proved, it is that Mercury revolves once in 24h., 5m., 30.5s., and Venus once in 23h., 21m., 22s.  He would as soon credit a statement that the earth has no axial rotation as that Mercury or Venus has none; and if he continues his study of Eastern physics it is with no confidence in its accuracy, and as a matter of curiosity.

The statement that Mercury, Venus, and the moon “are dead and disintegrating,” the former two “always presenting the same surface” to the sun, is the basis for an elaborate superstructure, both in the physics and the metaphysics of the East.  It is used in physics to explain how the “evolutionary wave” came to an end at the perfection of the mineral on Mercury with the loss of its axial rotation; how the “wave” then passed on to Venus with the seed of the vegetable kingdom, where the vegetable evolution ended with the loss of axial rotation; how from Venus it leaped to the moon, mother of animals and controller of animal life, with the seed of animal life in the vegetable; and how finally it came to the earth, when the moon ceased to revolve, bringing in the animal the seed of man.  Here man will be evolved and perfected.  Man has not yet been “born” on this earth, they say.  He is still in a prenatal or embryonic condition within the animal.

The lunar Pitris, the men-seed, have a physical reason for being, if this evolutionary theory be true; none if it is not.  Axial rotation is necessary in evolution, the ancient physics teaches, which must cease with it.  The reasons for this are too lengthy to give here.  Briefly, the rotation makes the electrical flow and a thermopilic dynamo of each planet.

The ancient astronomical teaching is absolutely true.  There will not be a work on astronomy published in Europe or the United States this year, or hereafter, that will not state that “Mercury and Venus revolve on their axes in the same time that they revolve around the sun,” which is another way of saying that “they have no axial rotation, always presenting the same face to the sun,” and an inaccurate way of presenting the truth.  The screw that holds the tire at the outer end of the spoke does not revolve “once on its axis” each time the wheel revolves.  Run a cane through an orange and swing it around; the orange has not revolved “once on its axis.”  Nor does the stone in a sling revolve “once on its axis” for each revolution around the hand.  The motion of Mercury is identically that of the impaled orange or the stone in the sling.  It has no axis and no axial rotation.  The modern astronomers, detected in pretenses to knowledge they never possessed, let themselves down easy.

This “discovery,” of no axial rotation by the interior planets, made by Schiaparelli and confirmed by Flammarion in 1894, has since been fully verified by our Western astronomers.  All the new astronomies accept it.  But the admission of astronomical “error,” to speak politely, comes too late for the student it turned back from his study of Eastern physics.  He cannot regain his lost faith and lost ground.