5. Mineral, Plant And Animal Creation

If, starting from the present day, someone were to go back through time into the period between the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, he would confront a strange spectacle: huge flying lizards with a kind of lantern-like formation on the head, radiating light and warmth; and down below, a soft, marshy Earth but with something very familiar about it because it would seem to a visitor of today to be emitting an odour, an odour between that of decaying substance and of green plants. The mud of this soft Earth would emit an odour partly seductive and partly extremely pleasant. And in it, moving about like creatures of the swamp, there would be these other animals, already with more limbs, rather like the lower species of mammals today but with powerful formations below—more powerful, naturally, than the webbed feet of ducks—by means of which they propelled themselves through the swamps.