Is a new Root-Race developed, not from the one immediately preceding it, but from the one before?  Is Mercury’s caduceus, here too, a symbol of the way evolution is done?  Did the Law keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the Atlanteans;—­holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity —­and therefore in a kind of pralaya;—­at the right moment, to push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not parallel to the Atlantean, but sui generis, and to be Aryan Fifth presently?—­Is the Law keeping in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race of Atlantean stock, holding that in reserve and apart all through our Aryan time, to develop from it at last the beginnings of the Sixth, on the new continent that will appear?  Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth to inhabit?

When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time:  when the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more with them—­for languages do become exhausted:  we cannot write English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer take the splendid dyes;—­and when that final flowering of Sanskrit is exhausted too—­will the new Sixth Race language, as a type, be a derivation from the Aryan?  Then how?—­Or will it, possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through which, during all these millions of years, such great and main brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments and uses?

All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the mark.  Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no truth in them at all.  And yet I think that if they were true, they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable:  China.

We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof:  that is, beyond the middle point.  And yet one in every four of the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the world is Atlantean still.