The Secret Doctrine maintains that, notwithstanding the general cataclysms and disturbances of the Fourth Round of our Globe, which—owing to its being the period of its greatest physical development, for the Fourth Round is the middle‐point of the Life Cycle allotted to it—were far more terrible and intense than during any of the three preceding Rounds—the Cycles of its earlier psychic and spiritual life and of its semi‐ethereal conditions—Physical Humanity has existed upon it for the last 18,000,000 years.(351) This period was preceded by 300,000,000 years of the mineral and vegetable development. To this, all those who refuse to accept the theory of a “boneless,” purely ethereal, man, will object. Science, which knows only of physical organisms, will feel indignant; and materialistic Theology still more so. The former will object on logical and reasonable grounds, based on the preconception that all animate organisms have always existed on the same plane of materiality in all the ages; the latter on a tissue of most absurd fictions. The ridiculous claim usually brought forward by Theologians is based on the virtual assumption that mankind (read Christians) on this Planet have the honour of being the only human beings in the whole Kosmos, who dwell on a Globe, and that they are consequently, the best of their kind.(352) The Occultists, who believe firmly in the teachings of the Mother‐ Philosophy, repel the objections of both Theologians and Scientists. They maintain, on their side, that, even during those periods when there must have been insufferable heat, even at the two poles, with successive floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting of the great waters and seas, none of these circumstances could form an impediment to human life and organization, such _as is assigned by them_ to early mankind. Neither the heterogeneity of ambient regions, full of deleterious gases, nor the perils of a crust hardly consolidated, could prevent the First and Second Races from making their appearance even during the Carboniferous, or the Silurian Age itself.