MAN A MONKEY AGAIN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2401, 7 March 1922, Page 1

MAN A MONKEY AGAIN.

REVERSAL OF EVOLUTION. SEVANT’S STARTLING THEORY. Recently a party of explorers came out of the hidden recesses of the unknown wilds of New Guinea hearing the report of the discovery of a most singular race of men that wa'lks like apes. Living as they do in the marshes, these men have no heed to walk, members of the. exploitation party report. On the other hand the marshes are covered with a growth that prevents navigation in canoes. The monkey-men have built huts in trees, and as organs of prehension alone are useful to them, their lower limbs have almost atrophied. This reported discovery of a tribe of ape-like men is of particular interest in connection with the startling theory of Prof. A. Linckewiez, a noted savant of Vienna. “Man is not only descended from monkeys,” declares Prof. Linckewiez, “but monkeys are descended from a race of prehistoric' men who, from being overcivilised, finanally sank into barbarism and from thence into savagery, eventually becoming monkeys again.”

“The world is now in the second stage of human evolution and, unless false culture is pushed aside and normality asserts itself over the modern tendencies toward destruction, the earth in another 2,000 years will be again peopled by monkeys.” In explaining his “pre-Darwinian” theory, Professor Linckewiez, who is now in his 86th. year, claims that archaeological .discoveries in China Egypt, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere prove conclusively, that a civilisation older than the Atlantic Ocean existed when what is now the United States was a sea. “The human race which inhabited the earth at the time,” he says, “was the result of fifty centuries of evolution from the principal ape, and was far more highly developed than is the civilisation of to-day, though along different lines. “At that stage, for instance, telephony had been replaced by telepathy, and it was possible for a .business man in China to send an order to an agent in Scandinavia by simply concentrating the processes of bis thought on the subject and transporting his mind for the moment to the other end of the earth.

“This faculty is at present retained only by a small group of Hindu philosophers in India, who have been remarkably successful in thought transference and in other : directions, such as the ability to simulate death for a period as long as seventy years, after which they emerge with a completely new brain whereon they receive impressions such as the brain of a year-old child would receive. These men are then practically re-born, and often live a normal lifetime thereafter. They cannot, however, repeat the experiment.

“The pre-civilised were in regular communication with certain of the stars, but it is not possible to say with which particular ones, although the Grecian ledgends surrounding planetary gods are undoubtedly founded on ledgends which have survived in the form of graven scriptures from the First Human 01 First Pre-Ape period.” “Finally this race became superhuman and the limit to their brain capacity having been over-reached their intelligence suddenly snapped. There is also reason to believe that they were steeped in debauchery and became non-procreative, so that when the tinal disaster came about their numbers were reduced to a few millions, residing for the most part in the warmer climes. “Following six or seven centuries, when the world was peopled with half-wits who destroyed the cities they had [built, pulled down the mighty civilisation their forefathers had raised, engaged in bloody wars among themselves and finally became again what they had been in the beginning—a race of monkeys. “To prove the truth of this it is necessary only to take a new-born infant and place it among'tnonkeys for its first fifteen years. By that time it will have absorbed all the habits of apes and wilVbe only halfhuman. It will never have learned the power of speech except in so far as it will chatter like a monkey. It will not be as agile as a monkey because it will have no tail, but should it be mated to an ape its children will be wholly apes. “A monkey, therefore, is a human idiot degraded by centuries of insanity.