The Occult Doctrine is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying Law in Nature, the latter having no personal “special design,” but acting on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole Manvantaric period and deals with the land‐worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have sought to come into being, hence both are under the same Evolutionary Law, and both have to progress according to Karmic Law. Both have started from the same Neutral Centre of Life and both have to re‐merge into it at the consummation of the Cycle. It is not denied that in the preceding Round man _was_ a gigantic ape‐like creature; and when we say “man” we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was developing for the use of man in this Round only—the middle, or the transition, point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man during the first two and a half Root‐Races what he is now. That point he reached, as said before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the Secondary period, as we claim. Till then he was, according to tradition and Occult Teaching, “a God on Earth who had fallen into Matter,” or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma, and since, whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do with the question of the _actual_ Man and his Inner Nature; the Fall mentioned above having left no “original sin” on Humanity. But all this has been sufficiently dealt with. Furthermore, we are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending arc—which is centrifugal for Spirit and centripetal for Matter—and those he is preparing to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will reverse the direction of the two forces—viz., Matter will become centrifugal and Spirit centripetal—that all such transformations _are next in store for the anthropoid apes also_; all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove next to man in this Round—for these will all be men in the Fifth Round, just as the present men inhabited ape‐like forms in the Third, the preceding Round.