things, so that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the useless!  The very facts that Ts’in Shi Hwangti, when the manvantara opened at the beginning of the third century B.C., was driven (you may say) to do what ruthless drastic things he did.—­ and that his action was followed by such wonderful results—­are proof enough that a long manvantara crowded with cultureal and national activities had run it course in the past, and clogged the astral, and made progress impossible.  But what he did do, throws the whole of that past manvantara, and to some extent the pralaya that followed it, into the realm of shadows.—­He burnt the literature.

In a few paragraphs let me summarize the history of that past age whose remnants Ts’in Shi Hwangti thus sought to sweep away.—­Yao adopted Shun for his successor; in whose reign for nine years China’s Sorrow, that mad bull of waters, the Hoangho, raged incessantly, carrying the world down towards the sea.  Then Ta Yu, who succeeded Shun on the throne presently, devised and carried through those great engineering works referred to above:  —­cut through mountains, yoked the mad bull, and saved the world from drowning.  He was, says H. P. Blavatsky, an Adept; and had learnt his wisdom from the Teachers in the snowy Range of SiDzang or Tibet.  His dynasty, called the Hia, kept the throne until 1766; ending with the downfall of a cruel weakling.  Followed then the House of Shang until 1122; set up by a wise and merciful Tang the Completer, brought to ruin by a vicious tyrant Chousin.  It was Ki-tse, a minister of this last, and a great sage himself, who, fleeing from the persecutions of his royal master, established monarchy, civilization, and social order in Corea.

Another great man of the time was Won Wang, Duke of the Palatinate of Chow, a state on the western frontier whose business was to protect China from the Huns.  Really, those Huns were a thing to marvel at:  we first hear of them in the reign of the Yellow emperor, two or three centuries before Yao; they were giving trouble then, a good three millenniums before Attila.  Won Wang, fighting on the frontier, withstood these kindly souls; and all China looked to him with a love he deserved.  Which of course roused King Chousin’s jealousy; and when a protest came from the great soldier against the debaucheries and misgovernment at the capital, the king roused himself and did what he could; imprisoned the protestant, as he dared not kill him.  During the three years of his imprisonment Won Wang compiled the mysterious I-King, of Book of Changes; of which Confucius said, that were another half century added to his life, he would spend them all in studying it.  No western scholar, one may safely say, has ever found a glimmer of meaning in it; but all the ages of China have held it profounder than the profound.