Moreover, a German scientific work is mentioned in a footnote on the same page. It says that: A Hanoverian Scientist has recently published a work entitled, _Ueber die __ Auflösung der Arten durch Natürliche Zucht‐wahl_, in which he shows, with great ingenuity, that Darwin was wholly mistaken in tracing man back to the ape. On the contrary, he maintains that it is the ape which is evolved from man. He shows that, in the beginning, mankind were, morally and physically, the types and prototypes of our present race and of our human dignity, by their beauty of form, regularity of feature, cranial development, nobility of sentiments, heroic impulses, and grandeur of ideal conceptions. This is a purely Brâhmanic, Buddhistic and Kabalistic doctrine. His book is copiously illustrated with diagrams, tables, etc. It asserts that the gradual debasement and degradation of man, morally and physically, can be readily traced throughout ethnological transformations down to our time. And, as one portion has already degenerated into apes, so the civilized man of the present day will at last, under the action of the inevitable law of necessity, be also succeeded by like descendants. If we may judge of the future by the actual present, it certainly does seem possible that so unspiritual and materialistic a race should end as Simia rather than as Seraphs. But though the apes descend from man, it is certainly not the fact that the human Monad, which has once reached the level of humanity, ever incarnates again in the form of an animal. The cycle of “metempsychosis” for the human Monad is closed, for we are in the Fourth Round and the Fifth Root‐Race. The reader will have to bear in mind—at any rate one who has made himself acquainted with _Esoteric Buddhism_—that the Stanzas which follow in this volume and the next speak of the evolution in our Fourth Round only. The latter is the cycle of the turning‐point, after which, matter, having reached its lowest depths, begins to strive onward and to become spiritualized, with every new race and with every fresh cycle. Therefore the student must take care not to see contradiction where there is none, for in _Esoteric Buddhism_ Rounds are spoken of in general, while here only the Fourth, or our present Round, is meant. Then it was the work of formation; now it is that of reformation and evolutionary perfection. Finally, to close this digression anent various, but unavoidable, misconceptions, we must refer to a statement in _Esoteric Buddhism_, which has produced a very fatal impression upon the minds of many Theosophists. One unfortunate sentence, from the work just referred to, is constantly brought forward to prove the materialism of the doctrine. The author, referring to the progress of organisms on the Globes, says that: