convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and which, at any rate with the Hellenes, meant certainly more than simply “soil-born,” or primitive aborigines; and yet the so-called fable of Deukalion and Pyrrha is surely no more incredible or marvelous than that of Adam and Eve—­a fable that hardly a hundred years ago no one would have dared or even thought to question.  And in its esoteric significance the Greek tradition is possibly more truly historical than many a so-called historical event during the period of the Olympiades, though both Hesiod and Homer may have failed to record the former in their epics.  Nor could the Romans be referred to as the Umbro-Sabbellians, nor even as the Itali.  Peradventure, had the historians learnt something more than they have of the Italian “Autochthones”—­the Iapygians—­one might have given the “old Romans” the latter name.  But then there would be again that other difficulty:  history knows that the Latin invaders drove before them, and finally cooped up, this mysterious and miserable race among the clefts of the Calabrian rocks, thus showing the absence of any race affinity between the two.  Moreover, Western archeologists keep to their own counsel, and will accept of no other but their own conjectures.  And since they have failed to make anything out of the undecipherable inscriptions in an unknown tongue and mysterious characters on the Iapygian monuments, and so for years have pronounced them unguessable, he who would presume to meddle where the doctors muddle would be likely to be reminded of the Arab proverb about proffered advice.  Thus, it seems hardly possible to designate “the old Greeks and Romans” by their legitimate, true name, so as to at once satisfy the “historians” and keep on the fair side of truth and fact.  However, since in the Replies that precede Science had to be repeatedly shocked by most unscientific propositions, and that before this series is closed many a difficulty, philological and archeological as well as historical, will have to be unavoidably created—­it may be just as wise to uncover the occult batteries at once and have it over with.

Well, then, the “Adepts” deny most emphatically to Western science any knowledge whatever of the growth and development of the Indo-Aryan race which, “at the very dawn of history,” they have espied in its “patriarchal simplicity” on the banks of the Oxus.  Before our proposition concerning “the old Greeks and Romans” can be repudiated or even controverted, Western Orientalists will have to know more than they do about the antiquity of that race and the Aryan language; and they will have to account for those numberless gaps in history which no hypotheses of theirs seem able to fill up.  Notwithstanding their present profound ignorance with regard to the early ancestry of the Indo-European nations, and though no historian has yet ventured to assign even a remotely approximate date to the separation