Behold, now, the earth peopled by man.  Through seven races must he pass, each with its various branches.  Yet these races are not contemporaneous; for Nature is in no hurry.  One race comes forward at a time, reaches the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness, in some new part of earth, the coming of another race.  These races and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same identical souls.  Hence, one race at a time; at first, even, one sub-race only, for the next is to be of a higher order.  After each root-race has run its course, the earth has always been prepared by a great geological convulsion for the next.  In this convulsion has perished all that makes up what we call civilization, yet not all men then living.  Since some souls are slower than others, all are not ready to pass into the second race, when the time for that race has come.  Hence fragments of old races survive, kept up for a time by the incarnation of the laggard souls whose progress has been too slow.  Thus, we are told, although the first and second root-races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain relics of the third and fourth.  The proper seat of this third root-race was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of Asia.  Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder of the third race.  Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him.  So it must always be.  Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second, savages.

The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous, Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic.  Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China.  From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the survivors of the lost Atlantis.

Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of man, as the Buddhist relates it.  How has he obtained his knowledge?  By means which, he says, are within the reach of any one.  First, of the history:  it is said to be well authenticated tradition.  Of the actual knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories, inheriting their information from the Atlantids.  Of human nature and destiny the Buddhist would say:  Here are the facts, look about you and see.  From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an explanation of facts, and these facts explained, confirm and establish the theory.  So, too, of