Band 2 Anthropogenesis - H.P. Blavatsky

** Vide infra, "The Septenary," in Part II.
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 218 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
legitimately within the scope of plain matter-of-fact natural history; and that they may be considered, not as the outcome
of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate
descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time. . . . Traditions of creatures
once co-existing with man, some of which are so weird and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible. For me the
major part of those creatures are not chimeras but objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a creature
evolved out of the imagination of an Aryan man by the contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he
tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once lived and dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps
flew. . . . . To me the specific existence of the Unicorn seems not incredible, and in fact, more probable than that theory
which assigns its origin to a lunar myth* . . . For my part I doubt the general derivation of myths from 'the contemplation of
the visible workings of external nature.' It seems to me easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled the
utterance of these oft-told tales until their original appearance is almost unrecognisable, than that uncultured savages
should possess powers of imagination and poetical invention far beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of
the present day; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons
and monsters of all descriptions are transformations than to believe them to be inventions."**
It is shown by the same geologist that man, "successively traced to periods variously estimated from thirty thousand to
one million years . . . . ., co-existed with animals which have long since become extinct (p. 20)." These animals, "weird
and terrible," were, to give a few instances -- (1) "Of the genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebrae show them to
have attained a length of nearly two hundred feet . . . . . . " The remains of such monsters, no less than ten in number,
were seen by Professor Marsh in the Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus
montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length; (3) the Dinosaurians (in the Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains), of still
more gigantic proportions; (4) the Atlanto-Saurus immanis, a femur of which alone is over six feet in length, and which
would be thus over one hundred feet in length! But even yet the line has not been reached, and we hear of the discovery
of remains of such titanic proportions as to possess a thigh-bone over twelve feet in length (p. 37). Then we read of the
monstrous Sivatherium in the Himalayas, the four-horned stag, as large as an elephant, and exceeding the latter in
height; of the gigantic Megatherium: of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The Unicorn: a Mythological Investigation," Robert Brown, jun., F.S.A.
** Pp. 3 and 4, Introduction to "Mythical Monsters."
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[[Vol. 2, Page]] 219 THE FLYING DRAGONS.
crocodile jaws on a duck's head, etc., etc. All these were co-existent with man, most probably attacked man, as man
attacked them; and we are asked to believe that the said man was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to
conceive that, surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a colossal giant, could have
survived, while all his foes have perished? Is it with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a gigantic
flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one great man of science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific
reasons why man should not have been "contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and go back as far as the
Secondary Period."*
"It appears," writes the very conservative Professor Jukes, "that the flying dragons of romance had something like a real
existence in former ages of the world."** "Does the written history of man," the author goes on to ask, "comprising a few
thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending
over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldea and China, shadowy mementoes of
prehistoric man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from others
which, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which
destroyed them with all their civilization;" (p. 17).
The few remaining giant animals, such as elephants, themselves smaller than their ancestors the Mastodons, and
Hippopotami, are the only surviving relics, and tend to disappear more entirely with every day. Even they have already
had a few pioneers of their future genus, and have decreased in size in the same proportion as men did. For the remains
of a pigmy elephant were found (E. Falconeri) in the cave deposits of Malta; and the same author asserts that they were
associated with the remains of pigmy Hippopotami, the former being "only two feet six inches high; or the still-existing
Hippopotamus (Choeropsis) Liberiensis, which M. Milne-Edwards figures as little more than two feet in height."***
Sceptics may smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy-tales. But by so doing they only justify the wisdom
of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that "the things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically
speaking, to the things that are unknown";**** and thus they laugh only at their own ignorance.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The Human Species," p. 52.
** "Manual of Geology," p. 301.
*** "Recherches sur les Mammiferes," plate I.
**** Preface to "Wonders by Land and Sea," (Shan Hai King).