e study of the stars became a characteristic pursuit, and this race
made great advances both in astronomy and astrology.

The Mongolian people were an improvement on their immediate ancestors
of the brutal Turanian stock. Born as they were on the wide steppes of
Eastern Siberia, they never had any touch with the mother-continent,
and owing, doubtless, to their environment, they became a nomadic
people. More psychic and more religious than the Turanians from whom
they sprang, the form of government towards which they gravitated
required a suzerain in the background who should be supreme both as a
territorial ruler and as a chief high priest.

_Emigrations._--Three causes contributed to produce emigrations. The
Turanian race, as we have seen, was from its very start imbued with
the spirit of colonizing, which it carried out on a considerable
scale. The Semites and Akkadians were also to a certain extent
colonizing races.

Then, as time went on and population tended more and more to outrun
the limits of subsistence, necessity operated with the least
well-to-do in every race alike, and drove them to seek for a
livelihood in less thickly populated countries. For it should be
realized that when the Atlanteans reached their zenith in the Toltec
era, the proportion of population to the square mile on the continent
of Atlantis probably equalled, even if it did not exceed, our modern
experience in England and Belgium. It is at all events certain that
the vacant spaces available for colonization were very much larger in
that age than in ours, while the total population of the world, which
at the present moment is probably not more than twelve hundred to
fifteen hundred millions, amounted in those days to the big figure of
about two thousand millions.

Lastly, there were the priest-led emigrations which took place prior
to each catastrophe--and there were many more of these than the four
great ones referred to above. The initiated kings and priests who
followed the "good law" were aware beforehand of the impending
calamities. Each one, therefore, naturally became a centre of
prophetic warning, and ultimately a leader of a band of colonists. It
may be noted here that in later days the rulers of the country deeply
resented these priest-led emigrations, as tending to impoverish and
depopulate their kingdoms, and it became necessary for the emigrants
to get on board ship secretly during the night.

In roughly tracing the lines of