B472 <=> B474 [BTG XXX Art, p. 473]

“Certain beings who were then enthused by this founded, in imitation of the followers of the said branch of painters, a similar society and the motto of their new movement was: ‘To-search-the-truth-in-the-shades-of-smells-obtained- between-the-moment-of-the-action-of-cold-at-freezing-and- the-moment-of-the-action-at-warm-decomposition.’

“Like the painters, they also then found between these said two definite smells about seven hundred very definite shades, which they employed in their elucidating experiments.

“I do not know to what these two peculiar ‘movements’ then in Babylon would have led and where they would have ceased, if a newly appointed chief of the city, during the time we were there, had not begun prosecuting the followers of that second new ‘movement’ because with their already sufficiently keen sense of smell they had begun to notice and unwittingly to expose certain of his what are called ‘shady dealings,’ with the result that he used every possible means to suppress everything connected not only with that second new movement, but with the first as well.

“As regards that organ of theirs about which we began to speak, namely, the organ for the perception of the visibility of other cosmic arisings which were beyond them, the deterioration of its sensibility, continuing also after the Babylonian period, reached the point that during our last stay on the surface of this planet your favorites already had the possibility of perceiving and distinguishing, instead of the one million nine hundred and twenty-one thousand and six hundred ‘tonalities-of-color’ which they ought to have perceived and distinguished, only the result of the penultimate what is called ‘sevenfold-crystallization-of-the-white-ray; that is forty-nine tonalities, and even then only some of your favorites had that capacity, while the rest, perhaps the majority, were deprived of even this possibility.