The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and PhilosophyBlavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Religion
The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Theosophy
These animals, “weird and terrible,” were, to give a few instances: (1)
The genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebræ show them to have
attained a length of nearly two hundred feet. The remains of such
monsters, no less than ten in number, were seen by Professor Marsh in the
Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus
Montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length. (3) The Dinosaurians, in
the Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains, of still more gigantic
proportions. (4) The Atlantosaurus Immanis, a femur of which alone is over
six feet in length, and which would be thus over one hundred feet in
length. But even yet the line has not been reached, and we hear of the
discovery of remains of such titanic proportions as to possess a thigh‐
bone over twelve feet in length!(503) Then we read of the monstrous
Sivatherium in the Himâlayas, the four‐horned stag, as large as an
elephant, and exceeding the latter in height; of the gigantic Megatherium;
of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with crocodile jaws on a duck’s
head, etc. _All these were coëxistent with man, most probably attacked
man, as man attacked them._ And we are asked to believe that the said man
was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to conceive that,
surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a
colossal giant, could have survived, while all his foes have perished? Is
it with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a
gigantic flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one
great man of Science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific reasons why
man should not have been “contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and
go back _as far as the Secondary Period_.”(504)
The very conservative Professor Jukes writes:
It appears that the flying dragons of romance had something like a
real existence in former ages of the world.(505)
And the author goes on to ask.
Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years,
embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we
in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of
years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldæa and China,
shadowy mementoes of prehistoric man, handed down by tradition,
and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from
others which, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been
submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed
them with all their civilization?(506)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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