The same revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years which Esoteric Philosophy claims as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore even the Stanza which says: “_The Mind‐born, the boneless, gave being to the Will‐born with bones_;”—adding that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago—has yet a chance of being accepted by future Scientists. As far as nineteenth century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of Science, that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our further assertion, viz., that the antiquity of the First Race dates back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are withheld—and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the primeval Divine Races with _certainty_ to either the early Secondary, or the Primary Ages of Geology—one thing is clear, that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the duration of _sexual, physical_, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account. Many Geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an Eocene man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who maintain that the above date carries us far back into the Secondary or “Reptilian” Age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the earliest Root‐Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil, or was held in suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality, out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch with the plane on which the evolution of the _ethereal astral_ Races proceeded. Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution—the plane of gross material causation. In those early ages, _astral_ evolution was alone in progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,(365) though developing on parallel lines, had no direct point of contact with one another. It is obvious that a shadow‐like _ethereal_ man is related by virtue of his organization—if such it can be called—only to that plane from which the substance of his Upâdhi is derived.