called fable of Deukalion and Pyrrha is
surely no more incredible or marvelous than that of Adam and Eve--a
fable that hardly a hundred years ago no one would have dared or even
thought to question. And in its esoteric significance the Greek
tradition is possibly more truly historical than many a so-called
historical event during the period of the Olympiades, though both Hesiod
and Homer may have failed to record the former in their epics. Nor
could the Romans be referred to as the Umbro-Sabbellians, nor even as
the Itali. Peradventure, had the historians learnt something more than
they have of the Italian "Autochthones"--the Iapygians--one might have
given the "old Romans" the latter name. But then there would be again
that other difficulty: history knows that the Latin invaders drove
before them, and finally cooped up, this mysterious and miserable race
among the clefts of the Calabrian rocks, thus showing the absence of any
race affinity between the two. Moreover, Western archeologists keep to
their own counsel, and will accept of no other but their own
conjectures. And since they have failed to make anything out of the
undecipherable inscriptions in an unknown tongue and mysterious
characters on the Iapygian monuments, and so for years have pronounced
them unguessable, he who would presume to meddle where the doctors
muddle would be likely to be reminded of the Arab proverb about
proffered advice. Thus, it seems hardly possible to designate "the old
Greeks and Romans" by their legitimate, true name, so as to at once
satisfy the "historians" and keep on the fair side of truth and fact.
However, since in the Replies that precede Science had to be repeatedly
shocked by most unscientific propositions, and that before this series
is closed many a difficulty, philological and archeological as well as
historical, will have to be unavoidably created--it may be just as wise
to uncover the occult batteries at once and have it over with.

Well, then, the "Adepts" deny most emphatically to Western science any
knowledge whatever of the growth and development of the Indo-Aryan race
which, "at the very dawn of history," they have espied in its
"patriarchal simplicity" on the banks of the Oxus. Before our
proposition concerning "the old Greeks and Romans" can be repudiated or
even controverted, Western Orientalists will have to know more than they
do about the antiquity of that race and the Aryan language; and they
will ha