The Lost Lemuria (1904)

I read W. Scott-Elliot’s The Lost Lemuria for the maps, dates, races, and place-names a later writer would set beside other accounts of a southern lost continent, and beside his own account of Atlantis. The copy is the London edition of the Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W. The title page prints the author as W. Scott-Elliot, author of “The Story of Atlantis” and “Man’s Place in the Universe,” and the year 1904. It does not print a fuller first name. The year is before 1929, so I treat the book as public domain and quote his sentences.

This scan has 60 file pages. The essay is printed as pages 1 to 44. The first page of the essay has no printed number. The next page is numbered 2, so I call that opening page p. 1. From there, the printed page is eight less than the file page: file page 10 is printed p. 2, and file page 52 is printed p. 44. The Foreword, file page 7, has no printed number. I cite that leaf as file p. 7. The two maps are unnumbered fold-outs after the text. Plate No. 1 is file p. 55. Plate No. 2 is file p. 57. The verso of the title page carries the pencil marks GN 751 .S3 and 2023.10. I do not treat those as part of the book.

The book is one paper. It has no contents list and no numbered chapters. The divisions below are his marginal headings, in order. This book never uses the name Mu. It says Lemuria. It does not cite Plato. I do not carry figures out of The Story of Atlantis into this review, though he tells the reader to remember that book, and the title page names it. I do not match his 9564 B.C. against anyone else’s reading of the same date. A short page on the author is W. Scott-Elliot.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Lost Lemuria, with two maps showing distribution of land areas at different periods.
• Author, as the title page prints it: W. Scott-Elliot.
• Edition: London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W. 1904. One paper. Foreword, then printed pages 1 to 44, then two fold-out maps. Plate No. 1 is titled “Lemuria at its greatest extent.” Plate No. 2 is titled “Lemuria at a later period.” Both are marked “The World” and carry the Society’s London imprint. Modern coasts are drawn in pale outline. The Lemurian land is the tinted area. The plates themselves do not print the place-names. Those names are in the text, and I take them from the text.
• What he claims: Lemuria was a real equatorial continent of the Third Root Race. He uses geology and the distribution of animals and plants, quoted from Haeckel, Wallace, Sclater, Blandford, and Hartlaub, to support what he takes from the Secret Doctrine and from archaic records. He refuses year-dates for Lemuria. He dates the last remnant of Atlantis, Poseidonis, to 9564 B.C. He puts the destruction of the main Atlantean continent in the Miocene, about 800,000 years ago. Lemuria, he says, died by fire, not by the tidal waves that drowned Atlantis.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• No year-dates for Lemuria. The life of the continent of Atlantis he puts, speaking roughly, at between four and five million years, because that is about the time since the Rmoahals arose. Lemuria, continent of the Third Root Race, must have lasted much longer, since in his scheme the figure four is the short nadir of a cycle. For Lemuria, “no dates can be stated with even approximate accuracy” (pp. 13 and 14).
• The two map periods. The older map, he infers, runs from the Permian through the Triassic and into the Jurassic. The second map runs through the Cretaceous and into the Eocene (p. 14). A dagger footnote on p. 8 says the dismemberment of Lemuria took place before the beginning of the Eocene Age, though parts endured. The table on p. 18 says Lemuria “perished before the beginning of the Eocene age.” I keep both wordings beside the phrase “into the Eocene period.”
• Greatest extent. From the Cape Verd Islands, a few miles from Sierra Leone, south-east through Africa, Australia, the Society Islands, and the seas between, to within a few miles of a Pacific island continent about the size of present South America, including Cape Horn and parts of Patagonia (p. 14).
• After the split. The straits between the two blocks were very long and in places extremely narrow. The present straits between Bali and Lomboc coincide with part of them, and they continued north by the west coast of Borneo, not the east coast, “as conjectured by Ernst Haeckel” (pp. 14 and 15). Inside a quotation from Haeckel on p. 3 he prints the same strait as Balij and Lombok. I keep both spellings.
• The nucleus of Atlantis. An island on the earlier map, north-west of the extreme promontory of Lemuria and due west of the present coast of Spain, was the nucleus of Atlantis from first to last. In the second map period it was joined to former Lemurian land and was already more a continent than an island. It was the mountainous region of Atlantis in its prime, when Atlantis embraced lands now North and South America, and again in its decadence, and of Ruta in the Ruta and Daitya epoch, and it practically constituted Poseidonis. The final submergence of Poseidonis he dates 9564 B.C. (pp. 15 and 16).
• Lands he thinks lasted. Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, parts of Somaliland, the south of Africa, and the extreme southern portion of Patagonia, probably since early Lemurian days. The same for the southern parts of India and Ceylon, except a temporary submergence of Ceylon in the Ruta and Daitya epoch (p. 16).
• Older than Lemuria. Remains of the Hyperborean continent, “the oldest known lands on the face of the earth”: Greenland, Iceland, Spitzbergen, the most northerly parts of Norway and Sweden, and the extreme north cape of Siberia (p. 16).
• Japan and Spain. Japan has been above water, as an island or as part of a continent, since the second Lemurian map. Spain has existed since that time and is, except for the far north of Norway and Sweden, probably the oldest land in Europe (p. 16).
• The Malay Peninsula. Soon after the second Lemurian map the whole peninsula was submerged for a long time, then raised again before the first Atlantean map, where it is part of a great continent (pp. 16 and 17).
• The table on p. 18, which is printed sideways. Depths of strata, in feet: 70,000 for the First Root Race, 42,000 for the Second, 15,000 for the Third or Lemurian, 5,000 for the Fourth or Atlantean, 500 for the Fifth or Aryan. Catastrophes, in the order printed down that column: Lemuria perished before the Eocene; the main continent of Atlantis was destroyed in the Miocene about 800,000 years ago; a second great catastrophe, with his own question mark, about 200,000 years ago; a third about 80,000 years ago; final submergence of Poseidonis 9564 B.C.
• Where the sexes separated. East of the mountainous region of which Madagascar formed a part, around the smaller of the two great lakes, on the earlier map. The fourth and fifth sub-races flourished there (p. 30).
• Who he still counts as Third Race remnants. The aborigines of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, some hill tribes of India, the Tierra-del-Fuegans, the Bushmen of Africa, and some other savage tribes (p. 28).
• Easter Island. A city built entirely of blocks of lava, about 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) west of the present island, later destroyed by volcanic eruptions. The statues, most of them about 27 feet (8.23 meters) high by 8 feet (2.44 meters) across the shoulders, he takes as the features and the height of the carvers or of their ancestors, probably in the later ages of the Lemuro-Atlanteans (pp. 37 and 38).
• How each continent ended. Atlantis was submerged by great tidal waves, in four great catastrophes, most of the people drowning. Lemuria was raked by burning ash and red-hot dust and eaten away by internal fires. He likens the sequence to Krakatoa in 1883 (pp. 38 and 39).
• Where the Fourth Root Race was founded. From the seventh sub-race, on land occupying the site of present Ashantee and Western Nigeria, a promontory on the second map north-west of an island-continent that embraced the Cape of Good Hope and parts of western Africa (p. 42). The Manu of that founding was an Adept from Venus (p. 42).
• What he marks as coming from previous writings. The nucleus of the Fifth or Aryan Root Race was chosen from the fifth or Semitic sub-race of the Fourth Root Race (p. 42). I leave it as a remembrance he points to, not as a case argued in this paper.
• Two gifts he does not derive on earth. Wheat, and the bee (p. 36). Both from Venus.

Foreword

The foreword is one sentence. He is not offering new information about Lemuria so much as tying other people’s evidence to books he already trusts.

The object of this paper is not so much to bring forward new and startling information about the lost continent of Lemuria and its inhabitants, as to establish by the evidence obtainable from geology and from the study of the relative distribution of living and extinct animals and plants, as well as from the observed processes of physical evolution in the lower kingdoms, the facts stated in the "Secret Doctrine" and in other works with reference to these now submerged lands.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), file p. 7

Evidence supplied by Geology and by the relative distribution of living and extinct Animals and Plants

He opens on the printed essay, which I call p. 1, by saying that science already grants the exchange of land and sea, that Atlantis has had scant recognition from science, and that opinion has long pointed to a vast southern continent “to which the name of Lemuria has been assigned.”

The long quotation that follows is Ernst Haeckel. From the pages I can read, Haeckel’s picture is this. The Mediterranean was once an inland sea, with an isthmus at the Straits of Gibraltar joining Africa and Spain. England, already in the time of man, was repeatedly joined to Europe and repeatedly cut off. Europe and North America were directly connected. The South Sea was a Pacific continent, and the little islands are the peaks. The Indian Ocean was a continent from the Sunda Islands along the southern coast of Asia to the east coast of Africa. Sclater, “an Englishman,” called it Lemuria from the monkey-like animals, and Haeckel calls it the probable cradle of the human race, developed in all likelihood out of anthropoid apes. The footnote is Scott-Elliot’s, not Haeckel’s.

Haeckel is correct enough in his surmise that Lemuria was the cradle of the human race as it now exists, but it was not out of Anthropoid apes that mankind developed.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 2

He says he will return to the place of the anthropoid apes. He does, on pp. 29 and 30.

Haeckel’s Malayan split, still inside the quotation: the western, Indo-Malayan division, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, was formerly joined by Malacca to Asia and probably to Lemuria. The eastern, Austro-Malayan division, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Guinea, Solomon’s Islands, and so on, was joined to Australia. Wallace fixed the old strait. Its south end “passes between Balij and Lombok” (p. 3). That is Haeckel’s spelling as this book prints it.

Scott-Elliot then gives the name in his own sentence, and the sentence contains his own slip, which I keep.

The name Lemuria, as above stated, was originally adopted by Mr. Sclater in recognition of the fact that it was propably on this continent that animals of the Lemuroid type were developed.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 3

He quotes A. R. Wallace next. The footnote on p. 4 names the book as Alfred Russell Wallace’s Geographical Distribution of Animals, Macmillan, 1876, volume 1, pages 76 and 77. Wallace allows a primary zoological region, but not its epoch or its limits. If it covered every land now inhabited by Lemuroid animals, it would run from West Africa to Burmah, South China, and Celebes, “an area which it possibly did once occupy.” Elsewhere Wallace uses an old connection between the Ethiopian sub-region and Madagascar to explain the Lemurine type. Ceylon and South India are granite and old metamorphic rock, while most of the peninsula is tertiary, so he thinks they were cut off on the north by sea and formed part of a southern continent or great island. Later, the plains and tablelands of Hindostan were formed, and a land road opened to what Wallace calls the Himalo-Chinese fauna. Scott-Elliot’s dagger on that page says Ceylon and South India were indeed bounded on the north by sea, “but that was at a much earlier date than the Tertiary period.”

On p. 5 he records that Wallace, after criticism from Dr. Hartlaub, later denied that such a continent had to be postulated. Scott-Elliot does not drop Wallace. He keeps the subsidences, the upheavals, and the relations of living and extinct faunas.

The Blandford extract begins on the same page. I follow it on the pages I have seen, pp. 7 and 8, not into the footnote’s journal pagination, which I do not print. Blandford is arguing a former land from the West Coast of India to the Seychelles, Madagascar, and the Mauritius, along coral atolls and banks: Adas bank, the Laccadives, the Maldives, the Chagos group, and the Saya de Mulha. Darwin has the Seychelles rising from a bank of between 30 and 40 fathoms. Further west, the Cosmoledo and Comoro Islands bring the chain near Africa and Madagascar. Blandford proposes the name Indo-Oceana. Scott-Elliot, in square brackets, says the name that has been generally adopted is Sclater’s, Lemuria. Huxley, on palaeontological grounds, had suggested a land connection in this region, “or rather between Abyssinia and India,” during the Miocene. Blandford infers the land from a far earlier date. The trap flows of the Dakhan are horizontal east of the Ghats and the Sakyadri range, and dip seaward to the west, so that the island of Bombay is the higher part of the formation. The depression to the westward is Tertiary, which he says is consistent with Huxley’s “after the Miocene.”

The animals Blandford is said to instance, as this book prints them, are Lion, Hyæna, Jackal, Leopard, Antelope, Gazelle, Sand-grouse, Indian Bustard, many Land Molusca, and notably the Lemur and the Scaly Anteater. I keep Molusca as printed. The Indo-Oceanic land, in the quotation, existed from at least early Permian times, probably, as Huxley had said, up to the close of the Miocene, and South Africa and Peninsular India are the remnants. Scott-Elliot’s own footnotes on p. 8 pull the dates his way.

A reference to the maps will show that Mr. Blandford's estimate of date is the more correct of the two.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 8

Parts of the continent of course endured, but the dismemberment of Lemuria is said to have taken place before the beginning of the Eocene Age.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 8

The first of those corrects Blandford against Huxley on how early the land began. The second refuses Huxley’s Miocene close as the end of the continent. Parts endured. The break-up, “is said,” was before the Eocene. That “is said” is his occult dating, not Blandford’s.

In the discussion he reports after the paper, Professor Ramsay agreed in a junction of Africa with India and Australia in geological times. Mr. Woodward was pleased to find the fossil flora of the Mesozoic series of India added to the case of Huxley, Sclater, and others for an old submerged continent, Lemuria, which Darwin’s coral-reef work had foreshadowed (p. 11).

He closes this stretch with Dr. G. Hartlaub. The footnote on p. 12 gives “On the Avifauna of Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands,” The Ibis, Fourth Series, Vol. i., 1877, p. 334. Hartlaub quotes Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, “five and thirty years ago,” that Madagascar, judged by zoology alone, would be neither Asiatic nor African, almost a fourth continent, and more different from nearby Africa than from distant India. That fourth continent, Hartlaub says, is Sclater’s Lemuria: a sunken land containing parts of Africa, extending far east over Southern India and Ceylon, whose highest points are the volcanic peaks of Bourbon and Mauritius and the central range of Madagascar, “the last resorts of the almost extinct Lemurine race which formerly peopled it.”

Evidence obtained from Archaic Records

The further evidence, he says, comes from the same source, and in the same manner, as that which produced the Story of Atlantis. He has been allowed copies of two maps. One is Lemuria and the adjoining lands at the greatest expansion. The other is the outline after dismemberment by great catastrophes, but long before the final destruction (p. 12).

He does not claim survey accuracy. The Atlantis maps, he says, were never professed to be correct to a single degree. These are less sure. For Atlantis there had been a globe, a good terra-cotta bas-relief, and a well-preserved map on parchment or skin. For Lemuria there was only a broken terra-cotta model and a very badly preserved and crumpled map, so the copies are harder (p. 13). Mighty Adepts in the days of Atlantis produced the Atlantean maps. He does not know whether the Lemurian maps were made by divine instructors while Lemuria still existed, or later, in the Atlantean epoch. The transcriber of the archaic originals still thinks them approximately correct in all important particulars.

Probable Duration of the Continent of Lemuria

The duration paragraph on p. 13 is one sentence built around dashes, so I do not quote it. The claim is plain. Speaking roughly, between four and five million years is the life of the continent of Atlantis, for it is about that time since the Rmoahals, the first sub-race of the Fourth Root Race, arose on a portion of the Lemurian continent which then still existed. Because the figure four is the nadir and the shortest stretch, whether of a Manvantara or of a race, Lemuria must be assigned many more millions of years than Atlantis. Then he stops.

But in the case of Lemuria no dates can be stated with even approximate accuracy.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 14

Geological epochs, “so far as they are known to modern science,” are the only contemporary scale he will use.

The Maps

Even the epochs are not printed on the maps. The inference is his.

The older map is the earth’s configuration from the Permian, through the Triassic, and into the Jurassic. The second probably runs through the Cretaceous and into the Eocene (p. 14). Set that “into the Eocene” beside the p. 8 footnote and the p. 18 table, both of which put the dismemberment, or the perishing, before the Eocene. He does not reconcile the three phrases. I leave them side by side.

From the older of the two maps it may be seen that the equatorial continent of Lemuria at the time of its greatest expansion nearly girdled the globe, extending as it then did from the site of the present Cape Verd Islands a few miles from the coast of Sierra Leone, in a south-easterly direction through Africa, Australia, the Society Islands and all the intervening seas, to a point but a few miles distant from a great island continent (about the size of the present South America) which spread over the remainder of the Pacific Ocean, and included Cape Horn and parts of Patagonia.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 14

On the second map the continent has split into two great blocks. The straits are very long and in places extremely narrow. The straits now between Bali and Lomboc coincide with part of the old straits.

It will also be seen that these straits continued in a northerly direction by the west, not by the east coast of Borneo, as conjectured by Ernst Haeckel.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 15

He uses the maps to answer Blandford. Between parts of India and great tracts of Africa there was direct land communication in the first map period, and a partial communication in the second. Compared with the maps of Atlantis, he says, there was continuous land, now in one epoch and now in another, between many regions now cut by sea, enough to account for the shared fauna and flora of the two Americas, of Europe, and of “Eastern lands.”

The distribution centre he names is the island north-west of Lemuria’s extreme promontory, due west of Spain. That island is the nucleus of Atlantis.

It was the great mountainous region of Atlantis at its prime, when Atlantis embraced great tracts of land which have now become North and South America.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 15

It remained that mountainous region in the decadence of Atlantis, and of Ruta in the Ruta and Daitya epoch, and it practically constituted Poseidonis, the last remnant, submerged in 9564 B.C. (p. 16). The sentence that carries 9564 is built around dashes, so the year is in the paraphrase and again in the table below.

A comparison of the two maps here given, along with the four maps of Atlantis, will also show that Australia and New Zealand, Madagascar, parts of Somaliland, the south of Africa, and the extreme southern portion of Patagonia are lands which have probably existed through all the intervening catastrophes since the early days of the Lemurian period.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 16

The same may be said of the southern parts of India and Ceylon, with the exception in the case of Ceylon, of a temporary submergence in the Ruta and Daitya epoch.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 16

The Hyperborean remains are older still.

These are Greenland, Iceland, Spitzbergen, the most northerly parts of Norway and Sweden, and the extreme north cape of Siberia.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 16

Japan is shown by the maps to have been above water, whether as an island, or as part of a continent, since the date of the second Lemurian map.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 16

Spain, too, has existed since that map, and is therefore, except for the most northerly parts of Norway and Sweden, probably the oldest land in Europe.

He warns that the statements have to stay indeterminate, because subsidences and upheavals happened between the maps. The example is the Malay Peninsula.

For example, soon after the date of the second Lemurian map we are informed that the whole Malay Peninsula was submerged and remained so for a long time, but a subsequent upheaval of that region must have taken place before the date of the first Atlantean map, for, what is now the Malay Peninsula is there exhibited as part of a great continent.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), pp. 16 and 17

Nearer home, he accepts Haeckel that England was repeatedly joined to the European continent and repeatedly separated from it, but he would rather say the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, which were then joined together (p. 17).

Reptiles and Pine Forests

He then prints a table of animal and plant life, bracketed, according to Haeckel, with the rock strata. Two further columns are his own: the contemporary races of man, and such of the great cataclysms as are known to occult students. The table fills p. 18 and is printed sideways. The race, depth, animal, and plant columns are ruled clearly enough to copy. The cataclysm lines are not in separate boxes I can swear to, so I set each sentence in the row it sits nearest, and I also give them in printed order in the findings above. The question mark after the second Atlantean catastrophe is his.

Rock strata, as he groups them	Depth of strata, feet	Races of men	Cataclysms, nearest row	Animals	Plants
Laurentian, Cambrian, Silurian. Archilithic or Primordial.	70,000	First Root Race which being Astral could leave no fossil remains.		Skull-less Animals.	Forests of gigantic Tangles and other Thallus Plants.
Devonian, Coal, Permian. Palaeolithic or Primary.	42,000	Second Root Race which was Etheric.		Fish.	Fern Forests.
Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. Mesolithic or Secondary.	15,000	Third Root Race or Lemurian.	Lemuria is said to have perished before the beginning of the Eocene age.	Reptiles.	Pine and Palm Forests.
Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene. Caenozoic or Tertiary.	5,000	Fourth Root Race or Atlantean.	The main Continent of Atlantis was destroyed in the Miocene period about 800,000 years ago. Second great catastrophe ? about 200,000 years ago.	Mammals.	Forests of Deciduous Trees.
Diluvial or Pleistocene, Alluvial. Quarternary or Anthropolithic.	500	Fifth Root Race or Aryan.	Third great catastrophe about 80,000 years ago. Final submergence of Poseidonis 9564 B.C.	More differentiated Mammals.	Cultivated Forests.

The period names Palaeolithic and Caenozoic are printed with the ae ligature. Quarternary is his spelling. Coal stands as a stratum name between Devonian and Permian. I have not supplied a cataclysm for the first two rows because I do not see a separate sentence there.

From the table, he says, Lemurian man lived in the age of Reptiles and Pine Forests. Amphibious monsters and the gigantic tree-ferns of the Permian still flourished in warm damp climates. Plesiosauri and Icthyosauri swarmed in the tepid marshes of the Mesolithic epoch. As inland seas dried, the Dinosauria, which he also calls the Dragons, became the dominant type, mostly beasts of prey from forty to fifty feet long. The Pterodactyls crawled and flew. The smallest were about the size of a sparrow. The largest had a breadth of wing of more than sixteen feet. Later digs found larger bones. The sentence begins on p. 17 and ends on p. 19, because p. 18 is the table.

Professor Ray Lankester, at a meeting of the Royal Institution on 7th January, 1904, is reported to have referred to a brontosaurus skeleton of sixty-five feet long, which had been discovered in the Oolite deposit in the southern part of the United States of America.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), pp. 17 and 19

He sets a stanza of the Book of Dzyan beside that natural history. The animals with bones, the dragons of the deep, and the flying sarpas were added to the creeping things. Those that creep got wings. Those of the long necks in the water became the progenitors of the fowls of the air. He then quotes Haeckel that birds came from reptiles, first in the Mesolithic epoch, probably during the Trias.

In plants, pine and palm gradually displaced the giant tree ferns. Mammals appear in the later Mesolithic days. The fossil remains of the mammoth and the mastodon, “their earliest representatives,” are chiefly in the Eocene and Miocene strata (p. 19).

The Human Kingdom

None of the people who now have even a moderate mental or spiritual culture can have lived in these ages. Only with the last three sub-races of the Third Root Race did the least progressed of the first group of the Lunar Pitris begin to return to incarnation. The most advanced of that group did not take birth until the early sub-races of the Atlantean period (p. 19).

For at least the first half of the race, Lemurian man is “an animal destined to reach humanity” rather than human as he uses the word. The second and third groups of Pitris, who were the inhabitants during the first four sub-races, had enough self-consciousness from the Lunar Manvantara to stand apart from the animal kingdom, but they had not received the Divine Spark that would give mind and individuality (p. 20).

Size and Consistency of Man’s Body

During this period the body changed more than at any other time, and the processes of reproduction were twice altered (p. 20).

His scale for that body is the rounds. Animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms ran their normal course on this, the fourth globe, during the Fourth Round. Humanity was ordained to run quickly over the stages of the previous rounds. The bodies of the First Root Race were gigantic phantoms of astral matter, invisible if we could have seen them at all. The Second Root Race he calls physical only because the bodies were of ether, still invisible to eyesight as it now exists. This was so that the Manu, and the Beings who aided him, could improve the physical type.

The highest type so far had been the huge ape-like creature of the three physical planets, Mars, the Earth, and Mercury, in the Third Round. When the human life-wave arrived on Earth in the Fourth Round, a residuum of those creatures was still in occupation, left from the period of obscuration. They joined the incoming stream once the race was fully physical. Their bodies may have been used for the most backward entities. The improvement on that type was worked out first on the astral plane, from “the architype originally formed in the mind of the Logos” (p. 21). I keep architype.

From the etheric Second Race came the Third, the Lemurian. The bodies were material, gases, liquids, and solids, but gases and liquids still predominated. The spine had not solidified. They could not stand erect. The bones were pliable, as an infant’s are now.

It was not until the middle of the Lemurian period that man developed a solid bony structure.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 21

He explains the change by the permanent physical atom, and points to Man’s Place in the Universe, pages 76 to 80. The physical plane, he says, is four grades of ether as well as gases, liquids, and solids. The Manu and his helpers gathered the appropriate matter round that atom.

Organs of Vision

Before the bones, the two eyes in front were rudimentary, used to seek food on the ground. The third eye, at the back of the head, was the chief centre of both astral and physical sight. The printed sentence doubles two words. I keep them.

But there was a third eye at the back of the head, the atrophied remnant of which of which is now known as the pineal gland.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 22

He quotes Professor Ray Lankester, from a report in the Standard of 8th January 1904, on the large parietal or pineal eye of the ichthyosaurs, and on the third eye that can still be studied in the common lizard, or better in the great blue lizard of the South of France.

Somewhat before the middle of the Lemurian period, probably during the third sub-race, the gigantic gelatinous body began to solidify, the limbs became bony, and the creatures could stand. The two eyes in the face became the chief organs of physical sight. The third eye remained to some extent a physical eye until the very end of the Lemurian epoch, and it remained an organ of psychic vision. That psychic vision lasted through the whole Lemurian period and well into the days of Atlantis (p. 23).

When they first stood and walked, they could walk backwards almost as easily as forwards. He gives two reasons: the third eye, and a projection at the heels.

Description of Lemurian Man

The description is of a man of one of the later sub-races, “probably the fifth.”

His stature was gigantic, somewhere between twelve and fifteen feet.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 23

His skin was very dark, being of a yellowish brown colour.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 23

The rest of the portrait, which I paraphrase because the sentences are built around dashes: a long lower jaw, a strangely flattened face, eyes small but piercing and set far apart so that he could see sideways as well as in front, and the eye at the back of the head, where no hair grew. No forehead, only a roll of flesh. The head sloped backwards and upwards. Arms and legs, especially the arms, were longer in proportion than ours, and could not be perfectly straightened at elbows or knees. Hands and feet were enormous. The heels projected backwards. He wore a loose robe of skin, something like rhinoceros hide but more scaly. Round the head, where the hair was quite short, another piece of skin carried tassels of bright red, blue, and other colours.

In his left hand he held a sharpened staff, which was doubtless used for defence or attack. It was about the height of his own body, viz., twelve to fifteen feet. In his right hand was twisted the end of a long rope made of some sort of creeping plant, by which he led a huge and hideous reptile, somewhat resembling the Plesiosaurus.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 24

The Lemurians actually domesticated these creatures, and trained them to employ their strength in hunting other animals.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 24

He calls the man an average commonplace specimen of his day, not entirely uncivilised, though the appearance gave an unpleasant sensation. Many were even less human. The seventh sub-race was a superior type, still unlike any living men. They kept the projecting lower jaw, the thick heavy lips, the flattened face, and the uncanny eyes, but they had developed something that might be called a forehead, and the heel projection was much reduced. In one branch the head was almost egg-shaped, the small end uppermost, the eyes wide apart and very near the top. Stature had decreased. Hands, feet, and limbs were more like those of the negroes of to-day. These people had an important and long-lasting civilisation and for thousands of years dominated most of the other tribes of the Lemurian continent. At the end, when racial decay seemed to be overtaking them, they took another lease of life and power by intermarriage with the Rmoahals, the first sub-race of the Atlanteans (p. 24).

Their general appearance now became not unlike that of some American Indians, except that their skin had a curious bluish tinge not now to be seen.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 25

The progeny kept many Third Race characteristics but really belonged to the Fourth Race, and so gained fresh power of development.

Processes of Reproduction

He calls the change in reproduction more astounding than the change in the body. He first copies Haeckel on non-sexual propagation: self-division, buds (Gemmatio), germ-buds (Polysporogonia), and germ-cells (Monosporogonia), then sexual or amphigonic propagation, hermaphrodites, and parthenogenesis, with the honey bee as Haeckel’s example. A drone from an unfructified egg, a queen or worker from a fructified egg. The footnote on p. 27 is Haeckel’s History of Creation, 2nd ed., Vol. i., pp. 193 to 198.

The application to Lemuria is his own paragraph, and then a quotation he marks as the Secret Doctrine.

Sweat-born, egg-born and Androgyne are the terms used in the Secret Doctrine.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 27

The quotation that follows: almost sexless at the start, the race became bisexual or androgynous, very gradually, over numberless generations. The simple cell from the earliest parent, “the two in one,” first developed into a bisexual being, and then the cell, becoming a regular egg, gave forth a unisexual creature. The units of the Third Race began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs, and to issue as distinct male and female babes, ages after the early progenitors. Toward the end of the fourth sub-race, the babe lost the faculty of walking as soon as it was liberated from the shell. By the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same conditions and by the same process as historical generations. “This required, of course, millions of years” (p. 28). The footnote is The Secret Doctrine, Vol. ii., p. 197.

Lemurian Races still Inhabiting the Earth

The early sub-races can scarcely be regarded as completely human. Only after the separation of the sexes, when the bodies were densely physical, did they become human even in appearance. The beings included the second and third groups of the Lunar Pitris, but were also largely recruited from the animal kingdom of the Lunar Manvantara.

The degraded remnants of the Third Root Race who still inhabit the earth may be recognised in the aborigines of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, some hill tribes of India, the Tierra-del-Fuegans, the Bushmen of Africa, and some other savage tribes.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 28

The entities now in those bodies must have belonged to the animal kingdom in the early part of this Manvantara. They attained the human kingdom during the evolution of the Lemurian race, before the door was shut on the entities thronging up from below (pp. 28 and 29).

Sin of the Mindless

He will not comment. He quotes the stanzas of the Book of Dzyan. During the Third Race the boneless animals grew and changed, became animals with bones, and their chayas became solid. I keep chayas. The animals separated first and began to breed. The two-fold man separated also. He said, let us as they, let us unite and make creatures. They did. Those that had no spark took huge she-animals unto them and begat dumb races. Their own tongues untied. The tongues of the progeny remained still. Monsters they bred.

A race of crooked red-hair-covered monsters going on all fours.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 29

An ancient commentary, which he puts in parentheses, adds that when the Third separated and fell into sin by breeding men-animals, the animals became ferocious, and men and they were mutually destructive. Till then, there was no sin, no life taken. The Lhas who had not built men wept. The Amanasa, which he glosses in brackets as mindless, had defiled their future abodes. This is Karma. Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach them better lest worse should happen. They did.

Then all men became endowed with Manas.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 29

They saw the sin of the mindless.

Origin of the Pithecoid and the Anthropoid Apes

The resemblance of man and the higher ape, he says, is not a common ancestor in the Darwinist sense. The esoteric account is the genesis of the pithecoid stocks. From the Secret Doctrine, Vol. ii., pp. 683 and 689, he takes this. The descendants of the semi-human monsters born of the sin of the mindless dwindled in size, became more densely physical, and culminated in a race of apes in the Miocene, from which the pithecoids of to-day are descended. With those Miocene apes, the Atlanteans of that age renewed the sin of the mindless, this time with full responsibility. The result is the apes now called Anthropoid.

We are given to understand that in the coming Sixth Root Race, these anthropoids will obtain human incarnation, in the bodies doubtless of the lowest races then existing upon earth.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 30

The place of the separation of the sexes, and of the fourth and fifth sub-races, is on the earlier of the two maps.

It lay to the east of the mountainous region of which the present Island of Madagascar formed a part, and thus occupied a central position around the smaller of the two great lakes.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 30

Origin of Language

Even when completely physical, the men of that epoch were still speechless. Astral and etherial ancestors, living in astral and etherial conditions, had no need of sounds. I keep etherial, which is his spelling here. He has already used etheric for the Second Race. When man became physical he could not for long remain dumb. The first sounds were composed entirely of vowels. Consonants came slowly. From first to last on Lemuria, language never reached beyond the monosyllabic phase.

The Chinese language of to-day is the sole great lineal descendant of ancient Lemurian speech for "the whole human race was at that time of one language and of one lip."

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), pp. 30 and 31

The footnote on p. 31 refuses the obvious inference about the people.

It must, however, be noted that the Chinese people are mainly descended from the fourth or Turanian sub-race of the Fourth Root Race.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 31

The other footnote is Secret Doctrine, Vol. ii., p. 198.

In Humboldt’s classification, as he gives it, Chinese is the isolating language, against the agglutinative and the inflectional. Readers of the Story of Atlantis may remember, he says, that many languages arose on Atlantis, but all were agglutinative, or, as Max Müller prefers, combinatory. Inflectional speech, Aryan and Semitic, was reserved for the Fifth Root Race.

The First Taking of Life

The first sin and the first taking of life, from the old commentary on Dzyan, is for him the start of the attitude between men and animals, and then between races of men. He pauses on a modern custom: kings and emperors on state occasions wear the garb of a fighting service, which he takes as the apotheosis of the combative qualities, descended from the time when the king was the warrior-chief. The Fifth Root Race, whose work is intellect, might have been expected to parade the Fourth Race attribute less. It has not. The era of one race overlaps another. The leading races belong to the Fifth, but the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants still belong to the Fourth (pp. 31 and 32).

On Lemuria the order of the strife, “from the information placed before the writer,” was this. Antagonism with animals came first. The new physical body needed food, and the animals were now ferocious, so men slaughtered them both in self-defence and for food. One of the first uses of the budding mind was to train animals as hunters. Then men used weapons on each other. The causes were the same as among savages to-day: someone else held a desirable object. Bands of marauders attacked and pillaged communities who dwelt at a distance from their own village. Organised warfare, he says, went no further than that, even to the end of the seventh sub-race (p. 32).

Armies and navies were reserved for the Atlanteans. Strife was the fundamental characteristic of the Fourth Root Race. Battles were constantly fought on land and sea. The principle was so deeply rooted that even now the most intellectually developed of the Aryan races are ready to war upon each other (p. 33).

The Arts

The arts begin with the fifth sub-race. The sexes were fully separated. The body was completely physical, and still gigantic. War with the monstrous beasts had begun, and men lived in huts. They tore down trees and piled them in a rude fashion. At first each family lived in its own clearing. They drew together into small communities as a defence against the wild beasts. Huts of rude trunks gave way to huts of boulders. Weapons were spears of sharpened wood, like the staff in the portrait above (p. 33).

Up to this time agriculture was unknown, and the uses of fire had not been discovered.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 33

The boneless ancestors had eaten what they could find on the surface or just below it. Walking erect, men took nuts and berries from wild forest trees. The chief food was the flesh of the beasts and reptiles they slew, tore in pieces, and devoured.

Teachers of the Lemurian Race

An event he calls the most momentous in the history of the human race then occurred. Beings of entirely different systems of evolution came to be associated with our humanity.

The Lhas “who had not built men” were the highly evolved humanity of some system whose course had already run, in the infinitely far-off past. After the dissolution of their chain they had passed the intervening ages in a Nirvanic condition. Karma now required a return to a field of action. They had not fully learnt compassion. Their temporary task was to be guides and teachers of the Lemurian race (p. 34).

Other Beings came voluntarily, from the scheme which has Venus as its one physical planet. That scheme has already reached the Seventh Round of its planets in its Fifth Manvantara. Its humanity is divine while we are only human. The Lemurians were merely on the verge of true manhood. The Venus beings came to educate infant humanity (p. 34). This copy has the word OTHER written in ink at the foot of p. 34, over the last line, and the first line of p. 35 is struck through. I do not read either pen mark as print. The readable text on p. 35 begins with the Lemurians advancing under that guidance.

Under it they advanced quickly in mental growth. Love and reverence for beings they felt to be wiser produced imitation, until the higher mental sheath could carry human characteristics from life to life, and the Divine Life could endow the recipient with individual immortality. He repeats the Dzyan line: then all men became endowed with Manas (p. 35).

He separates the two companies. The Venus beings were under no karmic impulse. They came as men to live and work among the Lemurians, but they were not required to assume the physical limitations. They could provide their own vehicles. The Lhas had actually to be born in the bodies of the race as it then existed. Hesitation on their part, he says, is why the sin of the mindless was not avoided. Their task was not only to guide and teach, but to improve the racial type, to evolve the physical body of the man to be out of the half-human, half-animal form (p. 35).

Up to this time the race was the second and third groups of the Lunar Pitris. They were now approaching the level the first group had reached on the Lunar chain, so that group returned to incarnation through the fifth, sixth, and seventh sub-races. Some did not take birth until the Atlantean period (p. 36).

The posts of the Venus beings were rulers, instructors in religion, and teachers of the arts.

The Arts continued

Under those teachers the people learnt fire, first by friction, later by flints and iron. They learnt to find metals, to smelt them, and to mould them. Spears of sharpened wood became spears tipped with metal. They learnt to dig and till, and to cultivate the seeds of wild grain until the type improved. That cultivation, carried on through the ages since, produced the cereals we now possess. He names barley, oats, maize, millet, and so on. Then the exception.

Wheat was not evolved upon this planet like the other cereals. It was a gift of the divine beings who brought it from Venus ready for the food of man. Nor was wheat their only gift. The one animal form whose type has not been evolved on our chain of worlds is that of the bee. It, too, was brought from Venus.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 36

They learnt to spin and weave. The fabrics were the coarse hair of a species now extinct, bearing some resemblance to the llamas of to-day, whose ancestors they may have been. The earliest clothing had been robes of skin stripped from slain beasts. Those skins were still worn on the colder parts of the continent. This copy has a pen correction on the next line, about curing and dressing the skin, so I do not quote it. Fire was used to cook both the flesh and the pounded grains of wheat, in modes he compares with savage cooking now. He thinks the divine rulers brought wheat at once because they knew the wild seeds would not feed the people for many generations (p. 37).

During the fifth and sixth sub-races the people in contact with the teachers were lifted by reverence. A constant influx from the first group of the Lunar Pitris, then returning to incarnation, helped a more civilised state.

Great Cities and Statues

During the later part of the sixth, and the seventh sub-race, they learnt to build great cities, of cyclopean architecture, corresponding with the gigantic bodies. The first cities were on the extended mountainous region which, on the first map, included the present island of Madagascar (p. 37).

Another great city is one he takes from the Secret Doctrine, Vol. ii., p. 317, built entirely of blocks of lava.

It lay some 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) west of the present Easter Island, and it was subsequently destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), pp. 37 and 38

The statue sentence is built around dashes, so I paraphrase it. Most of the gigantic statues measure about 27 feet (8.23 meters) in height by 8 feet (2.44 meters) across the shoulders. He thinks they were meant to represent not only the features but the height of those who carved them, or of their ancestors, for it was probably in the later ages of the Lemuro-Atlanteans that the statues were erected.

It will be observed that by the second map period, the continent of which Easter Island formed a part had been broken up and Easter Island itself had become a comparatively small island, though of considerably greater dimensions than it retains to-day.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 38

Civilisations of comparative importance arose on different parts of the continent and the great islands, with cities and settled communities. Large tribes who were also partially civilised continued a nomadic and patriarchial life. I keep patriarchial. Other parts, in many cases the least accessible, were peopled by tribes of extremely low type (p. 38).

Religion

With so primitive a race there was little religion they could be taught. Simple rules of conduct and the most elementary precepts of morality were all they were fitted to understand or practise.

During the evolution of the seventh sub-race, it is true that their divine instructors taught them some primitive form of worship and imparted the knowledge of a Supreme Being whose symbol was represented as the Sun.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 38

Destruction of the Continent

The contrast with Atlantis is the point he wants remembered.

Unlike the subsequent fate of Atlantis, which was submerged by great tidal waves, the continent of Lemuria perished by volcanic action.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 38

It was raked by the burning ashes and the red-hot dust from numberless volcanoes. Earthquakes and eruptions heralded each Atlantean catastrophe, but then the sea rushed in and most of the inhabitants drowned.

The Lemurians, on the other hand, met their doom chiefly by fire or suffocation.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 39

Another marked contrast between the fate of Lemuria and Atlantis was that while four great catastrophes completed the destruction of the latter, the former was slowly eaten away by internal fires, for, from the time when the disintegrating process began towards the end of the first map period, there was no cessation from the fiery activity, and whether in one part of the continent or another, the volcanic action was incessant, while the invariable sequence was the subsidence and total disappearance of the land, just as in the case of Krakatoa in 1883.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 39

He then compares the whole Lemurian series to the eruption of Mount Pelée, which destroyed St. Pierre, the capital of Martinique, “about two years ago.” The report he quotes is from The Times, 14th September 1903, so the “two years” is his distance from that eruption, not a date I convert. On p. 39 his own sentence says Mount Pelée and St. Pierre, and the quotation inside it says Mont Pelée. On p. 40 the same town is St. Piérre, and the shipmaster is Captain Freeman of the Roddam. I keep both forms of the mountain and of the town. The figures he copies: an immense black cloud, the city a blazing pyre in two or three minutes, red-hot dust and steam in both Martinique and St. Vincent, valleys in St. Vincent filled to between 100 feet (30.48 meters) and 200 feet (60 meters) and still very hot months later, steam and dust shot to between 1500 feet (457 meters) and 2000 feet (609 meters), rivers filled with black boiling mud. Freeman’s party, about a mile from St. Piérre, saw a repetition: red-hot stones, then a red-hot avalanche of dust at about 100 miles (160.93 kilometers) an hour, at a temperature of 1000 degrees centigrade. No lava flow, only steam and fine hot dust. Inside the crater of Mont Pelée a solid pillar of red-hot rock was rising, nearly 1000 feet (304 meters) high (pp. 39 to 41).

On the first Lemurian map, the lake south-east of the extensive mountainous region had an island that was little more than one great mountain, a very active volcano. The four mountains south-west of the lake were also active volcanoes.

The four mountains which lay to the south-west of the lake were also active volcanoes, and in this region it was that the disruption of the continent began.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 41

The seismic cataclysms submerged a large portion of the southern part of the continent by the second map period. Early Lemuria had a great number of lakes and marshes, and innumerable volcanoes. The map shows only some of the great volcanic mountains and only some of the largest lakes.

Another volcano on the north-east coast began its work early. Earthquakes completed the disruption.

Earthquakes completed the disruption, and it seems probable that the sea shown in the second map as dotted with small islands to the south-east of the present Japan, indicates the area of seismic disturbance.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 41

On the first map there were lakes in the centre of what is now the island-continent of Australia, where the land is now exceedingly dry. By the second map those lakes had disappeared. He conjectures that the great volcanoes to the south-east, between the present Australia and New Zealand, raked those districts with red-hot dust until the water-springs were dried up (p. 41).

Founding of the Atlantean Race

He ends the sketch by linking Lemuria to Atlantis, through the birth of the Fourth Root Race.

The Semitic claim is expressly a remembrance of previous writings, not a new argument.

It may be remembered from previous writings on the subject that it was from the fifth or Semitic sub-race of the Fourth Root Race that was chosen the nucleus destined to become our great Fifth or Aryan Root Race.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 42

Humanity was not physiologically ready for the parents of a new Root Race until the seventh sub-race on Lemuria. The segregation was made from that sub-race. On this page the print puts spaces on either side of the hyphen in sub-race. I do not reproduce that spacing.

The colony was first settled on land which occupied the site of the present Ashantee and Western Nigeria.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 42

A reference to the second map will show this as a promontory lying to the north-west of the island-continent which embraced the Cape of Good Hope and parts of western Africa.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 42

The colony was guarded for generations from any admixture with a lower type, increased in numbers, and was then ready to receive and to hand on the new impulse to physical heredity which the Manu was to impart.

No one belonging to our humanity has yet been in a position to undertake the office of Manu. He states that the founding of the coming Sixth Root Race will be entrusted to one of our Masters of Wisdom, one who belongs to our humanity and has reached a most exalted level in the Divine Hierarchy (p. 42). The sentence has dashes, so that is paraphrase.

The Manu of the Fourth Root Race was not one of us. He was one of the Adepts from Venus, of a very high order. The beings who came from the Venus system as rulers and teachers did not all stand at the same level (pp. 42 and 43).

A Lodge of Initiation

That difference of level is his reason for the last fact. There existed in Lemuria a Lodge of Initiation.

Naturally it was not for the benefit of the Lemurian race that the Lodge was founded.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 43

Such Lemurians as were sufficiently advanced were taught by the Adept Gurus. The instruction they required was limited.

Such of them as were sufficiently advanced were, it is true, taught by the Adept Gurus, but the instruction they required was limited to the explanation of a few physical phenomena, such as the fact that the earth moves round the sun, or to the explanation of the different appearance which physical objects assumed for them when subjected alternately to their physical sight and their astral vision.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 43

The Lodge was for the Venus beings who could transfer their consciousness from Venus to this earth, and provide vehicles for themselves, but who were still on the lower grades of the Path. A footnote says the heights they had reached will find their parallel when our humanity, countless aeons hence, has reached the Sixth Round, when the same powers will belong to ordinary mankind.

He does not describe the initiations. He says that purification, ennoblement, and expansion of consciousness have been written of elsewhere. The point he keeps for this paper is that a Lodge founded for beings from another scheme shows one object in all the schemes of our Solar Logos. There is a Path by which He may be directly reached, which every son of man is privileged to hear of and to tread. It was so in the Venus scheme. He presumes it is, or will be, so in all the schemes of our solar system.

This Path is the Path of Initiation, and the end to which leads is the same for all, and that end is Union with God.

W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 44

I keep his grammar, “the end to which leads.” The paper stops there. Printed p. 44 is the last page of text.