the bridges.  You may call English a universal language now; it might conceivably become so absolutely, after a few centuries.  But history will go on and time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law.  These are not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;—­which, I suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times ’since created man.’  In a million years from now the world will have contracted and expanded often.  We have seen, in our little period called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there have been contractions, too.  But contractions there will be, major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action and reaction are equal and opposite:  it is a fundamental law.  Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote descendants.  Then what will have become of the once universal English language?—­It will have split into a thousand fragment tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology—­the great expansion having happened again—­will have as much confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the Indo-European.—­In a million years?—­Bless my soul, in a poor little hundred thousand!

The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,—­or however long it may be; just as they have been doing in historical times.  You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.  Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing:  a momentary aspect of racial expression.  In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed.  Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than the fragment of a bar.

You all know the teaching of The Secret Doctrine about the Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes.  According to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years.  The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and that of a family-race, about