He _may_; but no one, except a Materialist, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life to represent the members of one progressive series. They are “the products of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one direction and now in another.” Therefore it is far more justifiable to say that the monkey evolved into the quadrumanous order, than that primeval man—who has _remained stationary_ in his human specialization since the first fossil skeleton found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save in colour and facial type—has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape. That man originates like other animals in a cell and develops “through stages indistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and _at last the human type_,” is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a God,” holds good throughout the ages. Hæckel, in his _Schöpfungsgeschichte_, shows a double drawing representing two embryos—that of a dog six weeks old, and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, with the exception of a slight difference in the head, which is larger and wider about the brain in the man, are indistinguishable. In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal, and finally of man. If we take him up at the more advanced stage, where the embryo has already passed the reptilian form, we find that for a considerable time, the line of development remains the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar, the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after the first four weeks’ growth _between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them_. Even at the age of eight weeks the embryo man is an animal with a tail, hardly to be distinguished from an embryo puppy.(587) Why, then, not make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile—a Nâga, instead of coupling man with the Quadrumana? This would be just as logical as the latter, if not more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to Æsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the Kabalists had remarked it from prehistoric times, it is no new discovery.(588)