The enormous antiquity of man, which was until lately frowned upon severely, is now a perfectly safe subject to teach: man's residence on earth is no longer considered to be a matter of thousands of years but of hundreds of thousands. The "Englishman's" skeleton of the Thames valley of which we have lately heard so much is conservatively reckoned to be 170,000 years old, and the "Gibraltar woman" is believed to have flourished half a million years ago or more! Neither of these antique personages represents the "missing link" in the least. The English skull is well-developed and of modern type; the woman's is not quite so good. Well, from 4004 B. C.--until lately the supposed date of man's creation according to Western belief founded on false interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures--to the five or six hundred thousand years now accepted, is a big jump. It is bigger in proportion than that from the half million to the eighteen millions of years that man has been embodied, according to the Theosophical records, which yet has to be made. We shall probably not have to wait long to see a further extension of time demanded and granted. It is noteworthy, and particularly interesting to students of Theosophy, that an increasing number of biologists are inclining to the belief that the human mind did not develop through an immensely protracted series of years, but that it came almost to its present perfection very quickly; that there was, in fact, _a sort of incarnation of mind_ into the highest and most suitable animal form available. The famous Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the "co-discoverer of Darwinism," uses many convincing arguments in favor of the high intelligence of "primitive" man. He says that Our intellectual and moral nature has not advanced in any perceptible degree. A writer in _Records of the Past_, says: A further evidence of the high intelligence of primeval man is found in the manner in which he maintained himself against the swarms of monstrous and ferocious beasts by which he was surrounded. Not only did he hold his own against them, but even, so we are told, exterminated many of them. We must remember also that man achieved this astounding victory over these mighty animals by means of stone weapons, which were of the rudest possible character. His triumph therefore, was solely due to his wonderful intelligence. The civilized inhabitants of modern India have not been able to exterminate the devastating tigers and snakes, etc., whose toll of human lives is still very heavy.