The Western student of the ancient Eastern physics soon meets
serious stumbling-blocks; and one at the very threshold has in
the last half century turned many back. In beginning his study
of the solar system, the pupil is told:

The first three planets--Mercury, Venus, and the moon--are dead
and disintegrating. Evolution on them has ceased. The proof of
this is found in the fact, that they have no axial rotation,
Mercury and Venus always presenting the same surface to their
father, the sun, and the moon the same surface to its daughter,
the earth.

This is a concrete statement of physical fact at which the
Western student protests. If in the whole range of Western
astronomical science there is any one fact that he has accepted
as absolutely proved, it is that Mercury revolves once in 24h.,
5m., 30.5s., and Venus once in 23h., 21m., 22s. He would as soon
credit a statement that the earth has no axial rotation as that
Mercury or Venus has none; and if he continues his study of
Eastern physics it is with no confidence in its accuracy, and as
a matter of curiosity.

The statement that Mercury, Venus, and the moon "are dead
and disintegrating," the former two "always presenting the
same surface" to the sun, is the basis for an elaborate
superstructure, both in the physics and the metaphysics of the
East. It is used in physics to explain how the "evolutionary
wave" came to an end at the perfection of the mineral on Mercury
with the loss of its axial rotation; how the "wave" then passed