From this statement it will be seen that Lemurian man lived in the age of Reptiles and Pine Forests. The amphibious monsters and the gigantic tree-ferns of the Permian age still flourished in the warm damp climates. Plesiosauri and Icthyosauri swarmed in the tepid marshes of the Mesolithic epoch, but, with the drying up of many of the inland seas, the Dinosauria--the monstrous land reptiles--gradually became the dominant type, while the Pterodactyls--the Saurians which developed bat-like wings-not only crawled on the earth, but flew through the air. The smallest of these latter were about the size of a sparrow; the largest, however, with a breadth of wing of more than sixteen feet, exceeding the largest of our living birds of to-day; while most of the Dinosauria-the Dragons-were terrible beasts of prey, colossal reptiles which attained a length of from forty to fifty feet. 1 Subsequent excavations have laid bare skeletons of an even larger size. Professor Ray Lankester, at a meeting of the Royal Institution On 7th January, 1904, is reported to have referred to a brontosaurus
|
Rock Strata. |
Depth of Strata. Feet. |
Races of Men. |
Cataclysms. |
Animals. |
Plants. |
|
|
Laurentian |
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. |
|
Cambrian |
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|
Silurian |
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|
Devonian |
Palæolithic or Primary. |
42,000 |
Second Root Race which was Etheric. |
|
Fish. |
Fern Forests. |
|
Coal |
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|
Permian |
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|
Triassic |
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. |
|
Jurassic |
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|
Cretaceous |
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|
Eocene |
Cenolithic 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. |
|
Miocene |
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|
Pliocene |
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|
Diluvial or Pleistocene |
Quarternary or Anthopolithic |
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. |
|
Alluvial |
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skeleton of sixty-five feet long, which had been discovered in the Oolite deposit in the southern part of the United States of America.
As it is written in the stanzas of the archaic Book of Dzyan, "Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, and flying sarpas were added to the creeping things. They that creep on the ground got wings. They of the long necks in the water became the progenitors of the fowls of the air." Modem science records her endorsement. "The class of birds as already remarked is so closely allied to Reptiles in internal structure and by embryonal development that they undoubtedly originated out of a branch of this class . . . . . The derivation of birds from reptiles first took place in the Mesolithic epoch, and this moreover probably during the Trias." 1
In the vegetable kingdom this epoch also saw the pine and the palm-tree gradually displace the giant tree ferns. In the later days of the Mesolithic epoch, mammals for the first time came into existence, but the fossil remains of the mammoth and mastodon, which were their earliest representatives, are chiefly found in the subsequent strata of the Eocene and Miocene times.
17:1 Ernst Haeckel's "History of Creation," Vol. ii., pp. 22-56.
19:1 Ernst Haeckel's " History of Creation," vol. ii., pp. 226-7.