pronounced at the time “evasive”—“a few drops of rain do not make a monsoon, _though they presage it_.” And now the truth of the following remark, in _Esoteric Buddhism_, will be fully apparent: It is impossible, _when the complicated facts of an entirely unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained minds for the first time_, to put them forward with all their appropriate qualifications ... and abnormal developments.... We must be content to take the broad rules first and deal with the exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case with a study, in connection with which _the traditional methods of teaching, generally followed, aim at impressing every fresh idea on the memory by provoking the perplexity it at last relieves_. As the author of the remark was himself, as he says, “an untrained mind” in Occultism, his own inferences, and his better knowledge of modern astronomical speculations than of archaic doctrines, led him, quite naturally, and unconsciously to himself, to commit a few mistakes of detail rather than of any “broad rule.” One such will now be noticed. It is a trifling one, still it is calculated to lead many a beginner into erroneous conceptions. But as the mistaken notions of the earlier editions were corrected in the annotations of the fifth edition, so the sixth may be revised and perfected. There were several reasons for such mistakes. They were due to the necessity, under which the Teachers laboured, of giving what were considered as “evasive answers”; the questions being too persistently pressed to be left unnoticed, while, on the other hand, they _could only be partially answered_. This position notwithstanding, the confession that “half a loaf is better than no bread” was but too often misunderstood, and hardly appreciated as it ought to have been. As a result thereof gratuitous speculations were sometimes indulged in by the European lay‐chelâs. Among such were the “Mystery of the Eighth Sphere” in its relation to the Moon, and the erroneous statement that two of the superior Globes of the Terrestrial Chain were two of our well‐known planets; “besides the earth ... there are _only two other worlds of our chain which are visible_ ... Mars and Mercury....”(279) This was a great mistake. But the blame for it is to be attached as much to the vagueness and incompleteness of the Master’s answer as to the question of the learner itself, which was equally vague and indefinite.