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As stated in the stanzas of Dzyan above quoted, the men of that epoch, even though they had become completely physical, still remained speechless. Naturally the astral and etherial ancestors of this Third Root Race had no need to produce a series of sounds in order to convey their thoughts, living as they did in astral and etherial conditions, but when man became physical he could not for long remain dumb. We are told that the sounds which these primitive men made to express their thoughts were at first composed entirely of vowels. In the slow course of evolution the consonant sounds gradually came into use, but the development of language from first to last on the continent of Lemuria never reached beyond the mono-
syllabic phase. The Chinese language of to-day is the sole great lineal descendant of ancient Lemurian speech 1 for "the whole human race was at that time of one language and of one lip." 2
In Humboldt's classification of language, the Chinese, as we know, is called the isolating as distinguished from the more highly evolved agglutinative, and the still more highly evolved inflectional. Readers of the Story of Atlantis may remember that many different languages were developed on that continent, but all belonged to the agglutinative, or, as Max Müller prefers to call it, the combinatory type, while the still higher development of inflectional speech, in the Aryan and Semitic tongues, was reserved for our own era of the Fifth Root Race.