BUCHANAN'S. JOURNAL OF MAN
Many Authors




BUCHANAN'S
                           JOURNAL OF MAN.

             VOL. I.        AUGUST, 1887.        NO. 7.




CONTENTS OF JOURNAL OF MAN.


  Creation's Mysteries
  A True Poet--The Poetry of Peace and the Practice of War
  The Volapьk Language
  Progress of the Marvellous
  Glances Round the World
  MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE--Photography Perfected; The Cannon King;
    Land Monopoly; The Grand Canals; The Survival of Barbarism;
    Concord Philosophy; The Andover War; The Catholic Rebellion;
    Stupidity of Colleges; Cremation; Col. Henry S. Olcott; Jesse
    Shepard; Prohibition; Longevity; Increase of insanity;
    Extraordinary Fasting; Spiritual Papers
  Cranioscopy (Continued)
  Practical Utility of Anthropology in its Psychic Department



CREATION'S MYSTERIES


Dr. B. Cyriax, editor of the _Spiritualistische Blдtter_, published at
Liepsic, Ger., has given in the issue of March 31st the following
communications from Dr. Hahnemann and Dr. Spurzheim, delivered through
a trance medium. They are valuable essays, whatever may be their
source, and the reader will not fail to observe their general
coincidence with the doctrine presented by myself in the May number of
the JOURNAL OF MAN in the article on the "Genesis of the Brain."

Wishing to have a psychometric test, I placed in the hands of Mrs.
Buchanan a portion of the manuscript of Spurzheim, who died fifty-five
years ago, to see if her conception of his thought would coincide with
the report from the trance medium. Her nervous system being somewhat
disturbed at the time, she was unable to go as far as I wished, but
she gave the following impressions:

    "This has been written sixty or seventy years ago, written by a
    person of very broad, elevated mind, progressive, a teacher or
    writer--perhaps both. He had a great deal of will power, strong,
    and decisive, was very independent, not afraid to give his
    views, but had a great deal of opposition to his sentiments. He
    was of a scientific cast of mind, was acquainted with medical
    science, and was more interested in the brain than anything
    else. He would talk, lecture, and write about the brain, and had
    very correct views in advance of others. He is in spirit life
    now. There is a warmth and nearness in the impression as though
    he would be attracted to the science you are engaged in. His
    mind broadens out into different lines of thought in spirit
    life--things appertaining to what he was interested in here, and
    kindred subjects. He thinks you are developing in the right
    direction. I think he has communicated with you. I think he has
    an overshadowing approval of your work. He feels that you are in
    an original line of thought, not dominated by any other minds.
    There seems an overshadowing influence that stimulates you."

As to his having communicated with me, it is true that over thirty
years ago I received some remarkable communications from him, through
a rapping medium, the messages being spelled out by the alphabet, and
his suggestions entirely in consonance with my teachings.

I then asked, "What views does he have of the process of creation and
development of life on the globe?" Which was answered "His views are
such as have been expressed by the believers in evolution, from the
lower to the higher orders of creation. I feel a pressure of
intellectual conceptions, but my nervous system is not in a state to
express it."

I then read through the statement of Spurzheim's views (his name being
still unknown to Mrs. B.), and asked how they coincided with the
sentiments she perceived in the person she described. She replied, "I
think he accepts or approves it generally. He would certainly sanction
such ideas. I think he has communicated, and that he would, in control
of a medium, express such ideas."

The messages of Hahnemann and Spurzheim have been so well translated
by a correspondent of the _Golden Gate_, that I reproduce them as
given in that journal, as follows:

    "If you consider the high development of the Caucasian race, it
    is repulsive to your sentiments to believe that man belongs to
    the animal kingdom as its highest link, and springs from this
    kingdom. Yet this feeling is false, and must be destroyed, since
    it originates only in self-conceit and it is not so very
    difficult to arrive at a juster view. Only go back to the time
    of Charlemagne or to that of Augustus, and observe the great
    mass of your forefathers, and you will find so great a
    difference, that you will be as much alarmed as if in the
    presence of Indians, when such a tribe of Germans is brought
    before you. Then go still further back into the pre-historic
    times, and form an image of the pile-builders and their mode of
    life, and of the cave-dwellers and their imperfect weapons and
    tools, and you will have to confess that these are separated
    from the present Europeans by a greater gap than are the
    uncultured inhabitants of the earth of to-day. And yet these
    cave-dwellers and pile-builders had already reached a high
    degree of culture in comparison with those who had preceded them
    by thousands of years; and if we thus join link to link in the
    chain backwards, we must come to the conclusion that the
    original men were but little distinguished in form and bodily
    structure, as well as in intellectual capacity, and at first
    hardly at all, from the animals standing next them, the
    four-handed ones.

    "The assumption that God has created man perfect, _i. e._, in
    body, but without power of judgment, and that he obtained this
    only by transgressing a command and a prohibition, and thus by a
    crime, so that he first began to degenerate upon the awakening
    in him of the divine intellect and reason, we leave wholly one
    side as absolutely contradicted by positive science, and only
    inquire, how, then, did man originate in so low a form? There
    are but two answers to this question. The one is, that man was
    placed upon the earth by an outside power in full size, rudeness
    and stupidity, in order to be left to his fate there in an
    unknown land, and to struggle for his existence with unknown
    animals. Or, on the other hand, that man was developed in a
    quite natural way, according to the law of evolution, out of the
    class of animals standing next below him. You are aware that we
    do not favor the first view, but so much the more earnestly
    embrace the latter. According to the law of evolution and
    adaptation the talents and capacities of animals were steadily
    changed in the course of thousands of years, following the
    changed relations of climate and soil, so as to fit themselves
    for the new conditions of sustenance and existence. In
    proportion as all nature became changed, so that at the end of a
    so-called geological period no comparison could be made with the
    beginning of the next preceding one, in that same proportion and
    measure the plants and animals had also changed, so that
    scarcely any more resemblance existed between these and those
    from which they originated. It is self-evident that amid such
    changes only those specimens continued to exist, which had
    adapted themselves in their progressive development in their
    organs and capacities in the best way to the new conditions of
    their existence. All those which had not thus changed lost the
    conditions of their existence and died out. But where did these
    organs and capacities, fitted to the newer relations, gain their
    form and development? In the mother-pouch of the female,
    undoubtedly! And of course this improvement advanced with each
    succeeding generation, so that animals which originally only
    lived in water, through gradual efforts to go on dry land also,
    to which, perhaps, they were forced to preserve their species,
    thereby changed the original fins into legs and later into
    web-feet by which they were adapted to live in water as well as
    on land (amphibia).

    "Now likewise there was developed in the gigantic four-handed
    Saurians such a change in the mother-pouch of the female animals
    as the ever finer organized brain created, so that in the course
    of thousands of years, a creature was gradually developed which
    overstepped the last stage of the sense-developed understanding
    and comprehension, and was in a position, through the putting
    into activity of the upper and front brain, to distinguish evil
    from good and to think independently. Of these creatures,
    likewise, only those survive that had in themselves the capacity
    for further development, while the rest perished. The survivors
    were the original men; those that perished formed the
    intermediate link between man and the brute. Thus, out of the
    infinite efforts of nature to create a finer organized species
    from the four-handed Saurians, came forth not only men, but the
    failures, the apes. So man does not descend from the ape, but
    both have only one stock, which is the four-handed animals
    sprung from the flesh-devouring Saurians.

    "Thus we can settle whence man comes and how he arose, but that
    does not solve the problem whence comes life or how it arose,
    yet on this point I will give place to friend Spurzheim.

    "Dr. Spurzheim then took control and spoke over half an hour in
    his peculiarly striking, logical and convincing way, yet it is
    quite impossible to repeat this discourse as it was given. It
    ran about as follows:

    "Worthy friends, friend Hahnemann has just given you an
    explanation of the origin of man to which I have nothing to add.
    The question whether the egg existed before the hen or the hen
    before the egg has often been called an idle one, and yet it
    obtrudes itself upon everybody. Our eyesight teaches that the
    egg comes from the hen, but at the same time also that the hen
    is developed from the egg, and if we go farther back we are lost
    in infinity. The theological view that God put into the world
    all that exists, all animals from the smallest seen by the
    microscope to the largest gigantic creatures in pairs and fully
    grown, seems to solve the problem of the egg and the hen, but
    has long since been refuted by science, so that we need not
    further meddle with it, and so much the less as thereby the
    question of the origin of life is not even touched. Let us now
    make a violent leap from man out into infinite space and back
    millions of years before the origin of man upon the earth. What
    do we see there? Unnumbered worlds, all which, like the sun,
    have brought forth other worlds dependent on them, and these by
    their development taking place according to like uniform laws in
    their infinite differences in size and specific gravity, yet
    ever striving after the same great end, the production of beings
    endowed with reason, offer the most glorious picture of Godlike
    power and harmony. The worlds born of these suns (planets) all
    originated in like manner, since the parts lying along the
    circumference of the suns, by their motion in space cooled off
    the sooner, broke away in irregular masses, and while
    contracting into globular shapes and revolving upon their own
    axis, yet by the force of attraction and their original motion
    bound to the bodies, whirl around these and with these move on
    in space. And though these balls of glowing gas, as the earth
    for example in its origin, in contrast with the mother-body
    (sun) are somewhat cooled off, yet is the heat of the same still
    so great (some reckoning it at two or six thousand degrees while
    others hold it incomputable) that absolutely no life can exist
    within such balls of fire. But after the more solid parts are
    formed (granite, porphyry, etc.,) gradually by cooling off and
    contracting, and these are fused together into larger masses,
    then begin the ribs of the earth-structure, the rocky
    foundations of the super-structure, and as soon as the
    development of the earth is so far advanced that oxygen and
    hydrogen can be formed into water, which falls down in frightful
    masses upon the hot rocks and dissolves them on the surface,
    then begins the condition productive of cells and carbon
    entering into the connection, and the first plants are brought
    forth; the algж first, then the lichens and ferns, which are
    developed into gigantic dimensions. Prior to and simultaneous
    with the formation of cells went on the production of crystals
    and the mineral as well as the vegetable kingdoms were further
    and further developed. Contemporary with the first plant-cells
    the conditions were plainly offered for the formation of the
    first life-cells.