and it is an ascertained fact that Central Asia was likewise the cradle of the Semitic and Turanian races (for thus it is taught in Genesis), and we find the Turans agreeably to the theory evolved by the Assyriologists preceding the Babylonian Semitists, where, at what spot of the globe, did these Semito-Turanian nations break away from the parent stock, and what has become of the latter?  It cannot be the small Jewish tribe of Patriarchs; and unless it can be shown that the garden of Eden was also on the Oxus or the Euphrates, fenced off from the soil inhabited by the children of Cain, philologists who undertake to fill in the gaps in Universal History with their made-up conjectures, may be regarded as ignorant of this detail as those they would enlighten.

Logically, if the ancestors of these various groups had been at that remote period massed together, then the self-same roots of a parent common stock would have been equally traceable in their perfected languages as they are in those of the Judo-Europeans.  And so, since whichever way one turns, one is met with the same troubled sea of speculation, margined by the treacherous quicksands of hypothesis, and every horizon bounded by inferential landmarks inscribed with imaginary dates.  Again, the “Adepts” ask why should any one be awed into accepting as final criterion that which passes for science of high authority in Europe?  For all this is known to the Asiatic scholar—­in every case save the purely mathematical and physical sciences—­as little better than a secret league for mutual support, and, perhaps, admiration.  He bows with profound respect before the Royal Societies of Physicists, Chemists, and, to a degree, even of Naturalists.  He refuses to pay the slightest attention to the merely speculative and conjectural so-called “sciences” of the modern Physiologist, Ethnologist, Philologist, &c., and the mob of self-styling Oedipuses to whom it is not given to unriddle the Sphynx of Nature, and who therefore throttle her.

With an eye to the above, as also with a certain prevision of the future, the defendants in the cases under examination believe that the “historical difficulty” with reference to the non-historical statement, necessitated more than a simple reaffirmation of the fact.  They knew that with no better claims to a hearing than may be accorded by the confidence of a few, and in view of the decided antagonism of the many, it would never do for them to say “we maintain” while Western professors maintained to the contrary.  For a body of, so to say, unlicensed preachers and students of unauthorized and unrecognized sciences to offer to fight an August body of universally recognized oracles, would be an unprecedented piece of impertinence.  Hence their respective claims had to be examined on however small a scale to begin with (in this as in all other cases) on other than psychological grounds.  The “Adepts” in Occult Arts had better keep silence when confronted with the “A.C.S.’s”—­Adepts