First, on account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented in the strata pertaining to the period; secondly, on account of the extremely limited nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative strata; and, thirdly, because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible to use—nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by time, whilst those two‐ thirds of the earth’s surface in which the remaining strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says: “For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; _of this history we possess the last volume alone_, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, _only here and there a short chapter has been preserved_; and of each page _only here and there a few lines_.”(593) It is not on such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is it on any ground of human pride, or unreasonable belief in man’s representing even here on Earth—in _our_ period, perhaps—the highest type of life, that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to types lower than our own; for it is not so. But simply because the “missing link,” which will prove the existing theory undeniably, will never be found by Palæontologists. Believing as we do that man has, during the preceding Rounds, evolved from, and passed through, the lowest forms of every life, vegetable and animal, on Earth, there is nothing very degrading in the idea of having the Orang Outang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite the reverse; as it would most irresistibly forward the Occult Doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in terrestrial nature into man. One may even enquire how it is that Biologists and Anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of the descent of man from the ape—how it is that they have hitherto left untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a logical sequence of the first theory—unless Science would make of man a privileged being, and his evolution a _non_‐precedent in Nature, quite a _special_ and unique case. And that is what all this leads Physical Science to. The reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the Hæckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape, not man, which is, in sober truth, a special and unique instance. The Pithecoid is _an accidental creation_, a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.