and super-Sanskrit in complexity;—­then Pyrenean by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains; and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier pronunciation,—­stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing intolerant of changes within itself;—­fitting itself to the weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;—­ dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds there are;—­till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was Chinese?  Is it primitive, or ultimate?  I am almost certain of this, at any rate:  that as a language-type, it stands somewhere midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the proud upward arc of the Fifth?  And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,—­Fifth certainly?  Is this, possibly, the explanation:  that the ancestors of the Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years, until some time later than 160,000 years ago—­the time of the beginning our our sub-race?  A pralaya, like sleep, is a period of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits:  whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright Immortal Self within.  Africa entered such a rest-period from an orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams and sorceries, and her people became what they are.  But if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu, the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would have been—­it might have been—­with a bent not towards intellectual, but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the West.  Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all we have at present.—­She attained marvelous heights; but they were not the same kind of heights the West has attained.  Through her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried whole provinces of Devachan with her.  It was while she was falling to pieces, that Ssu-K’ung T’u wrote his divinely delicate meditations.  When the iron most entered her soul, she would weep,