happiness,--the present. The Zoroastrians had four, each of 3,000
years. In the first, Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then
Ahriman, the bad-god, began to rule subserviently: in the third
both ruled equally; and in the last, now current, Ahriman has
gained the day.

Against the popular idea that man has caused the misery of this
world, he cites the ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred
gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites produced the mighty
reptile tyrants of air, earth, and sea; and when the monsters of
the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the ground with their
ponderous tread. And the world of waters is still a hideous scene
of cruelty, carnage, and destruction.

He declares Conscience to be a geographical and chronological
accident. Thus he answers the modern philosopher whose soul was
overwhelmed by the marvel and the awe of two things, "the starry
heaven above and the moral law within." He makes the latter sense
a development of the gregarious and social instincts; and so
travellers have observed that the moral is the last step in
mental progress. His Moors are the savage Dankali and other
negroid tribes, who offer a cup of milk with one hand and stab
with the other. He translates literally the Indian word Hathi (an
elephant), the animal with the Hath (hand, or trunk). Finally he
alludes to the age of active volcanoes, the present, which is
merely temporary, the shifting of the Pole, and the spectacle to
be seen from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter.

The Haji again asks the old, old question, What is Truth? And he
answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China,