_During the first seven crores [70,000,000 years] of the Kalpa the Earth and its two Kingdoms [mineral and vegetable], one already having achieved its seventh circle, the other, hardly nascent, are luminous and semi‐ ethereal, cold, lifeless, and translucid. In the eleventh crore_(_697_)_ the Mother [Earth] grows opaque, and in the fourteenth_(_698_)_ the throes of adolescence take place. These convulsions of Nature [geological changes] last till her twentieth crore of years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long intervals._ _The last change took place nearly twelve crores [120,000,000] of years ago. But the Earth with everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier._ Thus, if we are to believe Esoteric Teaching, _universal_ geological disturbances and changes have not occurred for the last 120 million years, but the Earth, even before that time, was ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took place only about 18,000,000 years ago, after the first great failure of Nature to create beings alone—_i.e._, without the help of the divine “Fashioners”—had been followed by the successive evolution of the first three Races.(699) The actual duration of the first two and a half Races is withheld from all but the higher Initiates. The history of the Races begins at the separation of the sexes, when the preceding egg‐bearing androgynous Race perished rapidly, and the subsequent sub‐races of the Third Root‐Race appeared as an entirely new race _physiologically_. It is this “Destruction” which is allegorically called the great “Vaivasvata Manu Deluge,” when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu, or Humanity, remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis “with him.” The allegory is very plain. In the symbolism of every nation, the “Deluge” stands for chaotic unsettled Matter—Chaos itself; and Water for the Feminine Principle—the “Great Deep.” As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it: Ἀρχὴ answers to the Hebrew _rasit_, or Wisdom ... and [at the same time] to the emblem of the female generative power, the _arg_ or _arca_, in which the germ of nature [and of mankind] floats or broods on the great abyss of the waters, during the interval which takes place after every mundane [or racial] cycle.