to trace the immortal Soul, while rejecting its existence, through a series of animal forms from the lowest to the highest; whereas, in truth, all the present fauna are the descendants of those primordial monsters of which the Stanzas speak. The animals—the creeping beasts and those in the waters that preceded Man in this Fourth Round, as well as those contemporary with the Third Race, and again the mammalia that are posterior to the Third and Fourth Races—all are either directly or indirectly the mutual and correlative product, _physically_, of Man. It is correct to say that the man of this Manvantara, _i.e._, of the three preceding Rounds, has passed through all the kingdoms of Nature. That he was “a stone, a plant, an animal.” But (_a_) these stones, plants, and animals were the prototypes, the filmy presentments of those of the Fourth Round; and (_b_) even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the astral shadows, as the Occultists express it, of the present stones, plants and animals. And finally, neither the forms nor genera of either man, animal, or plant were what they became later. Thus the astral prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which _preceded_ the Chhâyâs of Men, were the consolidated, though still very ethereal _sheaths_ of the still more ethereal forms, or models, produced at the close of the Third Round on Globe D, as set forth in _Esoteric Buddhism_; produced “from the residue of the substance; matter from dead bodies of men and [other _extinct_] animals of the Wheel before,” or the previous _Third_ Round—as Shloka 28 tells us. Hence, while the nondescript “animals” that preceded the Astral Man at the beginning of this Life‐cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the Man of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence, in a great measure, to Man again. Moreover, the “ancestor” of the present anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless Man, who desecrated his human dignity by putting himself physically on the level of an animal. The above accounts for some of the alleged physiological proofs, brought forward by the Anthropologists as a demonstration of the descent of man from the animals. The point most insisted upon by the Evolutionists is that, “The history of the embryo is an epitome of that of the race.” That: Every organism, in its development from the egg, runs through a series of forms, through which, in like succession, its ancestors have passed in the long course of earth’s history.(428) The history of the embryo ... is a picture in little, and outline of that of the race. _This conception forms the gist of our fundamental biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place at the head of the study of the fundamental law of organic development._(429)