UC-NRLF 
 
 B 3 llfl 7M3 
 
 ^.NNINGS 
 
 OR GLIMPSES Of 
 mNISHED CIVILIZATIONS 
 
 MA RION McMURROUGH MULHALL 
 
HISTORn 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/beginningsorglimOOmulhrich 
 
BEGINNINGS 
 
 OR 
 
 GLIMPSES OF VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 EXPLORERS IN THE NEW WORLD 
 BEFORE AND AFTER COLUMBUS, 
 
 AND 
 
 THE STORY OF THE JESUIT MISSIONS OF 
 
 PARAGUAY 
 
 (With Pre-CJolumban Maps). 
 
 The Times. — "The book contains much learning, based on re- 
 search in the Vatican and other libraries." 
 
 Tablet. — "The work is not only interesting but useful, and likely 
 to have a permanent value." 
 
 Morning Post. — " The author has evidently gone to infinite 
 trouble in order to secure accuracy and fulness of detail ; and the 
 result attained cannot but prove satisfactory to the reader." 
 
 Westminster Gazette. — "The work shows great research and 
 keen interest on the part of the authoress, who deals at greater 
 length with Raleigh's search for the Ei Dorado." 
 
 Rome.— "Mrs. Mulhall needs no introduction to students 
 engaged in historical research. . . , There is much that is 
 striking in her work, and very much that is valuable." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "To gain distinction in this subject to-day 
 a writer must have great courage, a personality that shows itself 
 in the work, and the good fortune to be a discoverer in old 
 archives. These desiderata appear to be in the happy possession 
 of Mrs. Mulhall." 
 
 Scotsman. — " The book has a much higher value than attaches 
 to mere stories of adventure ; for it is soberly as well as interest- 
 ingly written and well based on sound historical authorities." 
 
 Spectator. — " Mrs. Mulhall conducts us along many picturesque 
 by-ways of history." 
 
 Athenaum.—" The author can be congratulated upon the 
 industry expended by her in the collection of her facts, and the 
 literary skill with which she has presented the results." 
 
 Saturday Review. — " Mrs. Mulhall's researches in the Vatican 
 library and elsewhere have provided her with a good deal of new 
 material for her book, especially concerning the rise and fall of the 
 Jesuit Missions of Paraguay." 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA. 
 
BEGINNINGS 
 
 OR 
 
 GLIMPSES OF 
 VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 MARION McMURROUGH MULHALL 
 
 MEMBER OF THE ROMAN ARCADIA 
 
 AUTHOR OF "EXPLORERS IN THE NEW WORLD: BEFORE AND AFTER COLUMBUS* 
 
 "THE STORY OF THE JESUIT MISSIONS OF PARAGUAY," "BETWEEN THE 
 
 AMAZON AND ANDES," "THE CELTIC SOURCES OF THE 
 
 DIVINE COMMEDIA," ETC. 
 
 The food of the Historian is truth " 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1911 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 

/ 
 
 DeMcation* 
 
 TO ALL MY YOUNG FRIENDS, BOYS AND GIRLS. 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 241133 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The present little book is devoted to an at- 
 tempt to simplify the story of the early begin- 
 nings of our world, and to trace the origin 
 of the vanished civilizations, remains of which 
 are now being brought to light every day by 
 distinguished archaeologists. The treatment of 
 such subjects in so small a compass may well 
 deserve the name of " Glimpses," and only 
 merits consideration from the fact that the 
 author confesses to have annexed without 
 qualm or compunction (but she hopes with 
 care) the writings of learned men, and has 
 tried to re-tell their discoveries in plain lan- 
 guage suitable to her youthful readers. It can 
 scarcely be said that there is anything in this 
 book which has not appeared somewhere be- 
 fore, in the vast literature of many lands which 
 has grown up round so many distinguished 
 scientists, some of whose books are so pro- 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 found as to be outside the range of general 
 readers. They have forgotten that youthful 
 students have to walk before they attempt to 
 run. This accomplishment in the paths of 
 early history the author of this little book has 
 endeavoured to teach, through the medium of 
 others' profundity. 
 
 MARION MoMURROUGH MULHALL. 
 
 Rome, 1911. 
 
BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 In essence a mystery is merely something 
 which one cannot understand. The form it 
 takes does not matter at all, and if we begin 
 to realize how strange and various are the 
 many different opinions of distinguished geo- 
 logists and antiquarians as to the origin of the 
 world and of the wonderful antiquities which 
 remain of its early civilizations, we shall see 
 what a wildly mysterious place the world is 
 after all. 
 
 Year after year shows more and more the 
 phenomenal rapidity by which every branch 
 of science moves on ; new discoveries in all 
 departments of applied science especially 
 attract distinguished students, and the earth's 
 hidden forces are but now on the threshold of 
 discovery. 
 
 Great scientists, however, who have from 
 the earliest ages presumed ''God's works to 
 
.2 ; BFJ&INNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 scan " in relation to the age of the earth and 
 man's first appearance on it, in opposition to 
 the teaching of the Book of Genesis, are no 
 nearer to the realization of their problems than 
 they ever were. 
 
 W. S. Jevons, in his " Principles of Science," 
 says, with truth, '' They have tried to prove so 
 much that they succeed in proving nothing. 
 No doubt, in a higher state of intelligence, much 
 that is now obscure may become clear. We 
 perpetually find ourselves in the position of 
 finite minds attempting infinite problems, and 
 can we be sure that where we see contradic- 
 tions, an infinite intelligence might not discover 
 perfect logical harmony ? " 
 
 It is very instructive to learn how extremely 
 shadowy are the opinions which sufficed to 
 convince some of the great anti-Christian 
 scientists of the length of man's appearance 
 on the earth, and an enormous collection of 
 matter and ideas have been issued bearing on 
 his early history. Of the value of these theories 
 there is to be said that they show the blind 
 and almost frenzied efforts of different epochs^ 
 creeds, and culture, to fathom a yet unfathom- 
 able mystery. 
 
 There is no crotchet, no ''mental fungus," 
 which cannot find a congenial soil in opposition 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 3 
 
 to the teaching of the Scriptures. Any obscure 
 person who launches forth a devastating idea 
 against authority is sure to find a following, 
 especially as in these days people have no 
 time to think for themselves. Professor Max 
 MuUer asks (apropos of man having gradually 
 ascended in the scale of organization — that he 
 has from some unknown period struggled from 
 something lower than the ape, through long 
 centuries, to what he is now), " Where, then, 
 is the difference between brute and man ? 
 What is it that man can do, and of which we 
 find no signs, no rudiments, in the whole brute 
 world ? I answer without hesitation ; the one 
 great barrier between the animal and man is 
 language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever 
 uttered a word. Language is our rubicon, and 
 no brute will dare to cross it. This is our 
 matter-of-fact answer to those who speak of 
 development ; who think they discover the 
 rudiments at least of all human faculties in 
 apes, and who would fain keep open the possi- 
 bility that man is only a more favoured beast, 
 the triumphant conqueror in the primeval 
 struggle for life" (''Science of Language"), 
 Lecture IX, p. 367). 
 
 The first indication of man*s superiority 
 
 over beasts is the faculty of speech, the next 
 
 1 * 
 
4 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 is the faculty of worship. The wild beast, to 
 escape the storm, flies howling to its den ; the 
 savage, awe-stricken, turns and prays. The 
 lowest man perceives a hand behind the light- 
 ning, hears a voice abroad upon the storm, 
 for which the highest brute has neither eye 
 nor ear. 
 
 The Word of God tells us, '' So God created 
 man in His own image, in the image of God 
 created He him ; male and female created He 
 them " (Gen. i. 27). 
 
 Professor Bonny, in his ''Story of our Planet," 
 said that the materials at the disposal of geo- 
 logists can never be anything but fragmentary. 
 "These inevitable imperfections arise from 
 various causes which may be summarized under 
 two heads — the one relating to the restrictions 
 which Nature has imposed upon our investiga- 
 tions ; the other to the inherent defects of the 
 record itself, for God has never since the fall 
 of man revealed anything to gratify a mere 
 thirst for knowledge, and the Scriptures avoid 
 all contact with scientific questions, confining 
 themselves exclusively to the moral renovation 
 of humanity." God does not forbid researches 
 so far as can be made into the laws of His 
 universe ; but He utterly refuses to aid or 
 accelerate these studies by revelation. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 5 
 
 The nebular and evolution theories are for 
 the moment the favourite ones by vrhich latter- 
 day scientists try to discover the workings of 
 God. In its broadest aspect, evolution under- 
 takes to explain the origin of the universe, of 
 all created things material and immaterial, 
 and more especially the origin of our own 
 planet, together with the plants and animals 
 living and extinct, including man's physical 
 nature ; it also pretends to demonstrate his 
 mental nature, but here it ignominiously 
 fails. 
 
 No one will presume to doubt but that the 
 same Being who created matter, and governs 
 it by immutable laws, might have formed what 
 was originally a fluid chaotic heterogeneous 
 mass, totally unfit for animal or vegetable life, 
 into a habitable world in a moment of time, 
 had He so pleased. Millions of years are as 
 an instant to the Great Creator Who has 
 existed for all time. Everything is formed 
 slowly, insensibly, with no apparent interven- 
 tion from without. 
 
 St. Augustine (a.d. 354) spoke of the creation 
 of things by a series of causes, and St. Thomas 
 Aquinas (1226-74) expounded and upheld St. 
 Augustine's view, and both the former and 
 Origen expressly state their belief that the 
 
6 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 creative days could not be of the ordinary kind, 
 but were periods of years. 
 
 It is remarkable to find after the lapse of 
 so many centuries the following paragraph in 
 " Sumer and Akkad," a book recently published 
 by the learned archaeologist, Mr. King. '' The 
 general effect of recent research has been to 
 reduce the very early dates which were formerly 
 in vogue ... it is advisable, as far as possible, 
 to think in periods." 
 
 Scientists who argue of the appalling lapse 
 of centuries necessary to raise the highest 
 mountains, which, according to them, were once 
 buried in the sea (for it is shown through a 
 microscope that the dust of a block of marble 
 taken from these peaks when ground is formed 
 of decomposed remains of marine animals) for- 
 get the wonderful forces of Nature, some of 
 which are only now being discovered. There 
 is no doubt that force has not been sufficiently 
 considered in the formation of the different 
 strata during the cooling process of the world. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, in his book " Man and the 
 Universe," shows us that " a radium atom is an 
 element possessing in itself the seeds of its own 
 destruction. Every now and then it explodes 
 and fires off a portion of itself. This can occur 
 several times in succession, and finally it seems 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 7 
 
 to become inert and to cease to be radium or 
 anything like it ; it is thought by some to have 
 become lead, while the particles thrown off 
 have become helium, or possibly neon some- 
 times or even argon. We cannot stop there, 
 we are bound to go on to ask what was the 
 origin of the radium itself. If it explode itself 
 to pieces in the course of a few thousand years, 
 why does any radium still exist? How is it 
 being born ? Does it spring into existence out 
 of nothing, or has it some parent ? And if it has 
 a parent, what was the origin of that parent ? " 
 
 Radium has now a rival in polonium five 
 thousand times rarer than radium, and possess- 
 ing a radio-activity superior to it ; but while 
 radium conserves its energy for an indefinite 
 period, polonium disappears rapidly. 
 
 What influence radium, polonium, and such 
 like forces, some of which are still unknown, 
 have had on the formation of the different 
 strata of the earth's surface has yet to be dis- 
 covered. And if it should be, the discovery will 
 probably revolutionize the wonderful theories 
 of distinguished scientists on scientific matters. 
 
 In these days of radium and polonium, etc., 
 it is interesting to read what Winsor, in his 
 " Critical History of America," p. 382, writes 
 of the afterwards well-known American scien- 
 
8 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 tist James P. Southall. These ideas are just 
 as true now as they were when written, while 
 new theories have changed continually. 
 
 '' Three years after publishing his book, 
 ' The Recent Origin of Man, as Illustrated by 
 Geology and the Modern Science of Prehis- 
 toric Archaeology' (Philad., 1875), leaving out 
 some irrelevant matters as touching the an- 
 tiquity of man, condensing his collations of 
 detail, sparing the men of science an attack for 
 that which in his earlier volume he called their 
 fickleness, he published a more effective book, 
 ' The Epoch of the Mammoth and the Ap- 
 parition of Man upon Earth ' (Philad., 1878). 
 Barring its essentially controversial character, 
 and waiving judgment on its scientific deci- 
 sions, it is one of the best-condensed accumu- 
 lations of data which has been made. His 
 belief in the literal worth of the Bible nar- 
 rative is emphatic. He thinks that man, 
 abruptly and fully civilized,^ appeared in the 
 East, and gave rise to the Egyptian and 
 Babylonian civilization, while the estrays that 
 wandered westward are known to us by their 
 remains, as the early savage denizens of 
 
 1 The Sumerian and Akkadian civilization has since 
 been discovered to be earlier than either that of the Baby- 
 lonian or Egyptian. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 9 
 
 Europe. To maintain this existence of the 
 hunter-man of Europe within historic times, he 
 rejects the prevailing opinions of the geologists 
 and archaeologists. He reverses the judgment 
 that Sir Charles Lyell expresses ('Student's Ele- 
 ments of Geology,' Am. ed., p. 162) of the his- 
 torical period as not affording any appreciable 
 measure for calculating the number of cen- 
 turies necessary to produce so many extinct 
 animals, to deepen and widen valleys, and to 
 lay so deep stalagmite floors, and says it does. 
 He contends that the stone age is not divided 
 into the earlier and later periods with an inter- 
 val, but that the mingling of the kinds of flints 
 shows but different phases of the same period.^ 
 And that what others call the palaeolithic man 
 was in reality the quaternary man with con- 
 ditions not much different from now.^ The 
 
 1 Dawson also in "Fossil Man," p. 218, says : "I think 
 American archaeologists and geologists must refuse to 
 accept the distinction of a palaeolithic from a neolithic 
 period until further evidence can be obtained ". 
 
 2 Dawson, in his. "Fossil Man," "Nature and the 
 Bible," " The Story of the Earth," and in his address as 
 President of the Geological Section of the British Associa- 
 tion in 1876, confronts his opponents' views of the long 
 periods necessary to effect geographical changes by telling 
 them that in historic times " the Hyrcanian Ocean has 
 dried up and Atlantis has gone down ". 
 
10 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 time when the ice retreated from the now 
 temperate regions he holds to have been 
 about 2000 years b.c, and he looks to the 
 proofs of the action of which traces are left 
 along the North American great lakes, as 
 observed by Prof. Edmund Andrews of Chi- 
 cago, to confirm his judgment of the glacial 
 age being from 5300 to 7500 years ago. He 
 claims that force has not been sufficiently re- 
 cognized as an element in geological action 
 (see Brackman, note), and that a great lapse of 
 time was not necessary to eflPect geological 
 changes ('Ep. of the M.,' 194). He thinks 
 the then drift of opinion, carrying back the 
 appearance of man anywhere from 20,000 to 
 9,000,000 years, a mere fashion."^ 
 
 The gravel of the Somme has been, he holds, 
 a rapid deposit in valleys already formed and 
 not necessarily old. The peat beds^ were a 
 
 ^ From Winsor's " Critical History of America ". 
 
 2 Palmer, in his *' Migration from Shinar," says : " The 
 formation of peat beds was a burning question with scien- 
 tists for many years, and it seems incredible that men of 
 Sir Charles Lyell's and his French friend, M. Boucher de 
 Perthes' scientific standing, should have allowed themselves 
 to reason as if they were profoundly ignorant of all these 
 obvious conditions of peat formation ". For example, when 
 speaking of an accumulation of peat, in his " Antiquity of 
 Man," of which they make a great deal, they say : " The 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 11 
 
 deposit from the flood that followed the glacial 
 period, and accumulated rapidly ('' Ep. of the 
 M.," chap. X.). The extinct animals found with 
 the tools of man in the caves simply show that 
 such beasts survived to within historic times, 
 as seems everywhere apparent as regards the 
 mastodon when found in America. The sta- 
 lagmites of the caves are of unequal growth, 
 and it is an assumption to give them uniformly 
 great age. The finely-worked flints found 
 among those called palaeolithic ; the skilfully 
 free drawings of the cave men ; the bits of pot- 
 tery discovered with the rude flints, and the 
 great similarity of the implements to those in 
 use to-day among the Eskimos ; the finding of 
 Roman coin in the Danish shell heaps and 
 an EngHsh one in those of America ('' Proc. 
 Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci.," 1866, p. 291), are all 
 parts of the argument which satisfies him that 
 the archaeologists have been hasty and incon- 
 clusive in their deductions. 
 
 workmen who cut peat or dredge it up from the bottom of 
 swamps or ponds, declare that in the course of their lives 
 none of the hollows which they have formed, or caused by 
 extracting peat, have ever been refilled, even to a small ex- 
 tent. They deny, therefore, that the peat grows. This, as 
 M. Boucher de Perthes observes, is a mistake, but it im- 
 plies that the increase in one generation is not very ap- 
 preciable by the unscientific (" Antiquity of Man," p. 110). 
 
12 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 ^' Only let us note this," says Dr. Kirk in his 
 "Age of Man," ''as a specimen of the ad- 
 vanced knowledge and mode of reasoning of 
 distinguished scientists. The workmen were 
 right, and they properly used the language, 
 peat does not grow ! The ' unscientific ' hap- 
 pened, in this case, to have retained their 
 common sense, but the ' scientific ' were wrong 
 — the ' educated ' had allowed their wits to go 
 wool-gathering ! And yet these are some of 
 the great minds we are invited to follow when 
 we leave the Bible, in order to enjoy the pri- 
 vilege of 'advanced' views" ("The Age of 
 Man," p. 67). 
 
 It is but fair to the memory of Sir C. Lyell 
 to state that he candidly acknowledged his 
 error to Prof. Kirk. 
 
 In the paper " America " a few months ago 
 there was an interesting account by Father 
 Ahern of lectures delivered in Innsbruck by 
 the distinguished German entomologist Theo. 
 Eric Wasman, S.J., 1908, on the theories of 
 evolution and monism.^ These lectures were 
 in a manner a repetition of a famous series 
 given by him in Berlin in February, 1907, 
 against the monistic school of evolutionists 
 whose high-priest is Prof. Haeckel. The lec- 
 ^F Ahern, "lAmerica". 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 13 
 
 tures were under the auspices of the " Ke- 
 plerbund," a society formed by distinguished 
 Protestant scientists in opposition to the " Mo- 
 nistenbund" of Haeckel and his supporters. 
 The '' Keplerbund " includes amongst its mem- 
 bers many of the foremost scientists of the 
 German Empire, and it is under the leader- 
 ship of Dr. Dennert Godesberg. It is not an 
 enemy of the evolutionary theory ; quite the 
 contrary. But it brands as a prostitution of 
 science the attempt to use evolutionary or any 
 other scientific theory in order to undermine 
 anyone's religious belief. Science, it holds, is 
 not necessarily atheistic ; it cannot, in fact, do 
 without God, since it must demand a first 
 cause if it demands any cause at all. With 
 these foundation principles the " Keplerbund " 
 is naturally not in favour with Prof. Haeckel 
 or his school of thought. Hence the great 
 animus displayed in his attacks on any of the 
 scientists belonging to it. Unfortunately for 
 this great man's reputation, he has been lately 
 charged and proved guilty by Prof. Brass (a 
 German) (for the purpose of bolstering up an 
 hypothesis in a recent work) of falsifying the 
 drawings of a number of embryos so as to 
 make them look more alike (and to show that 
 man was originally an ape). Haeckel was 
 
14 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 obliged to confess that he really altered the 
 figures of the embryos, but defended himself 
 by saying that they were ''schematic figures," 
 and that hundreds of German investigators 
 were guilty of similar alterations ; a charge 
 which was indignantly denied, especially by 
 a body of forty-six German zoologists/ Sche- 
 matic figures, it is true, are commonly used for 
 many purposes of research, but their schematic 
 character is always noted and explained, and 
 the student is not led to imagine that they re- 
 present a reality. This was not the case with 
 Prof. Haeckel's schematic figures. 
 
 In the course of his lectures Prof. Wasman 
 says : " Christian scientists cannot accept the 
 biogenetic principle in its entirety, nor can we 
 sanction its application to man in order to 
 prove his descent from beasts. There is not 
 a single genus or species yet discovered that 
 can be regarded as a connecting link. In the 
 course of the palaeontological examination 
 of the human race, it has happened again and 
 again that connecting links between man and 
 
 1 The worthlessness of Prof. Haeckel's falsified embryos 
 was not only condemned by the zoologists mentioned above, 
 but also by such distinguished scientists as Koelsch, Kiehel, 
 and Brass, and by almost the entire German press, with 
 the exception of the social, democratic, and radical sheets. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 15 
 
 apes have apparently been discovered, but each 
 time the discovery has led to disappointment. 
 The^ Pithecanthropus erectus found in 1891 in 
 Java made a great stir and was finally pro- 
 nounced by the highest scientific authorities to 
 be a true ape. 
 
 Still more famous than the Pithecanthropus 
 was the so-called Neanderthal man discovered 
 in 1850 or thereabouts. From the commence- 
 ment Prof. Virchow expressed his doubts as 
 to its antiquity. In 1901 Schwalbe examined 
 it again and declared that he thought the 
 owner of the skull had not been a human 
 being, but had belonged to some species stand- 
 ing midway between ape and man. Not long 
 after, in 1904, the same scientist declared that 
 the Neanderthal creature had not belonged to 
 any intermediate species, but was a man of 
 some pre-historic race. 
 
 What were beheved to be the oldest human 
 or quasi-human remains ever discovered have 
 been recently unearthed near Chapelle-aux- 
 Saints in the Department of the Coreze, and 
 acquired by the Paris Museum of Natural 
 History. M. Perrier, director of that institu- 
 tion, in a communication to the Academy of 
 Sciences, assigns the remains to the Pleistocene 
 or Glacial Period. From description they ap- 
 
16 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 peared to be the long-sought missing link, 
 being neither man nor ape, but having the 
 characteristics of both. The skull more re- 
 sembles that of a human being, but the shape 
 of the limbs indicate that the creature walked 
 on all fours rather than erect. In close juxta- 
 position to the skull were found the teeth of a 
 rhinoceros. This fossil is now known by the 
 title ''Homo Aurignacencis Hauseri," for, alas ! 
 to the disappointment of the anti-Christian 
 scientists it has been pronounced by Prof. 
 Hauser to be the remains of another pre- 
 historic man. 
 
 The Department of the Dordogne, where this 
 wonderful pre-historic man was discovered, is 
 suspiciously near the great petrifying springs 
 of Clermont Ferrand, the properties of which 
 are so strong as to change in the short space 
 of three years the bodies of cows, horses, trees, 
 and even those of men into good fossils, so 
 that learned scientists, many of whom jump 
 quickly at conclusions, might readily conclude 
 that these fossils belonged to the glacial 
 period. 
 
 Of course it will be a hard saying to many 
 people who believe implicitly in the genius of 
 the scientists, Profs. Huxley, Darwin, Sir C. 
 Lyell, Lubbock, Spencer, Haeckel, etc., that 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 17 
 
 it is perfectly possible in twenty years or so 
 their work may be considered quite out of 
 date. Dare one say they will be considered 
 (although many will give them credit for their 
 industry if not for their ideas) to have trans- 
 gressed the usual limitations of serious scien- 
 tists by having declared as legitimate truths 
 facts for which to this day have never even the 
 semblances of proof been found. One of the 
 great evils of this age is the love of novelty, 
 it does not require even a noted scientist to 
 propound a new theory of the commencement 
 of the world. 
 
18 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Atlantis. 
 
 f 
 Many distinguished authorities in later days 
 
 fail to see why Plato's story of the lost conti- 
 nent Atlantis, told as history derived from the 
 Egyptians, a people who it is known preserved 
 most ancient records, and who were able to 
 trace their existence back to a vast antiquity, 
 claiming to be a colony from Atlantis, should 
 have been contemptuously set aside as a fable 
 by Greeks, Romans, and the modern world. 
 "It can only be," says Donnelly ("Atlantis," 
 p. 300), " because our predecessors, with their 
 limited knowledge of the geological history of 
 the world, did not believe it possible that any 
 large part of the earth's surface could have 
 thus suddenly been swallowed up by the sea. 
 It is very probable that it was by a succession 
 of earthquakes that so vast a tract of land was 
 destroyed." So early as 1779, M. Bailly, the 
 celebrated French astronomer, in his letters to 
 Voltaire "Surl'Atlantide de Plato '^ (Paris, 1779) 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 19 
 
 maintains the existence of the Atlantides and 
 their island^ Atlantis by the authorities of 
 Homer, Sanchoniathon, and Diodorus Siculus 
 in addition to Plato. In proof of the opinion 
 that Plato's account is not a fiction of his own 
 devising, another writer (see Taylor's transla- 
 tion of the Cratylus, Phsedo, Parmenides, 
 and Timseus of Plato, 1793) alleges the follow- 
 ing relation of one Marcellus who wrote a his- 
 tory of Ethiopian affairs according to Proclus 
 in Timseus, p. 55. That such and so great an 
 island once existed is evinced by those who 
 have composed histories of things relative to 
 the external sea . . . and besides this that the 
 inhabitants of this island preserved the memory 
 of the prodigious magnitude of the Atlantic 
 island, as related by their ancestors, and of its 
 governing for many periods all the islands of 
 the Atlantic Sea, and such is the relation of 
 Marcellus in his Ethiopic history. 
 
 The changes the earth's surface had under- 
 gone was a subject of much speculation among 
 the ancients. They sometimes allude to cata- 
 strophies as if they were well-known historical 
 events. The story of Atlantis was a good deal 
 discussed and led to much difference of opinion. 
 
 ^ The ancients called most lands islands. 
 2* 
 
20 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 Every year, owing to the discoveries of dis- 
 tinguished archaeologists as Profs. Sayce, 
 Garstang, Delitsch, Naville, Hintal, Petrie, 
 Maspero Layard, Rawlinson, Hall, King, and 
 the Egyptian exploration expedition,^ shows 
 more and more the truth of Plato's story, 
 
 1 Dr. Max Ohnefalsch Eichter, Ph.D., who has made 
 many important excavations in Cyprus lately, on behalf 
 of the Eoyal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, has 
 discovered the site of the Altar of Incense of Aphrodite 
 mentioned by Homer. He also found the Zeus inscription 
 at Eantidi which shows that besides being the " Altar Hill 
 of Aphrodite " it was, according to Prof. Meister, who de- 
 ciphered the inscriptions, also the ancient mount of 
 divinities, a place of worship of many gods and goddesses. 
 This hill has been mentioned both by Euripides and 
 Homer, and has been usually thought to have existed only 
 as a phantasy of the poets. 
 
 The gods and goddesses of the Greek and other heathen 
 mythologies were no others than the kings, heroes, and 
 heroines of the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. 
 Zeus was King of the Atlantides and used to feast once a 
 year with the blameless Ethiopians. Probably the remains 
 of a civilization, recently discovered by Prof. Leo Frobenius 
 in Nigeria, may be traced back to these people or to the 
 great Berber race. Prof. Frobenius errs in calling the 
 site where he discovered the remains of civilization the 
 city of Atlantis. Atlantis was a vast continent as America 
 is to-day ; that it may be part of the continent is very hkely, 
 just as Cyprus, the Canary, Azores, and British Isles all 
 formed part of the great kingdom of the Atlantides. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 21 
 
 which he firmly believed, that ''when Solon 
 an Athenian visited Egypt the priests of Sais 
 told him that a large island, which had been 
 the seat of a great monarchy, was destroyed 
 by an earthquake, and the adjacent seas ren- 
 dered unnavigable with the mud, etc. it left 
 behind it ". Certain accounts which have been 
 handed down by the early Carthagenian navi- 
 gators confirm the story told by the priest of 
 Sais, of the submerged land which lay outside 
 the Straits of Gades. Avienus, who was well 
 acquainted with the Carthagenian records, 
 writes of it in his own '' Ora Maritima," p. 402. 
 Bailly says : " There can be no question that 
 Solon visited Egypt. The causes of his depar- 
 ture from Athens for a period of ten years are 
 fully explained by Plutarch. He dwelt, he 
 tells us, ' On the Canopian shore by Nile's 
 deep mouth,' there he conversed upon points 
 of philosophy and history with the most learned 
 of the Egyptian priests. He was a man of ex- 
 traordinary force and penetration of mind, as 
 his laws and his sayings, which have been pre- 
 served, testify, and he commenced a history 
 and description of Atlantis which was unfor- 
 tunately unfinished at his death. This manu- 
 script reached the hands of his successor and 
 descendant Plato, a scholar, thinker, and his- 
 
22 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 torian like himself, and one of the profoundest 
 minds of the ancient world. ^ 
 
 "The Egyptian priest from Sais had said to 
 Solon : ' You Greeks have no antiquity of his- 
 tory, and no history of antiquity ! ' and then 
 related the story of Atlantis which to the 
 present time has descended through Plato. 
 Solon, on his return from Egypt, related the 
 story told to him by the priests of Sais to the 
 Greeks. /'There existed an ancient and cele- 
 brated race of people in Greece, the wisdom 
 of whose laws, and the fame of whose valour, 
 are renowned in the sacred writings and 
 ancient annals of Egypt. This heroic race 
 were as highly celebrated for their exploits by 
 sea as by land, as was evident in their arduous 
 contests with the mighty nation who formerly 
 inhabited the vast island of Atlantis, now 
 
 1 In his popular history of America, W. C. Bryant says : 
 " These speculations, traditions, and supposed fables, though 
 they are not history, yet it is not impossible that in them 
 may be found much aid in putting together the unwritten 
 story of the early human race especially on the Continent 
 of America". Prof. Short, in his "American Anti- 
 quities," also thinks that the old American or Indian tra- 
 ditions are quite as reliable as those of Egypt, Greece, or 
 Eome, especially as learned men are now turning their 
 attention to the hieroglyphics existing on the ruined 
 temples of Yucatan. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 23 
 
 buried in the ocean which bears its name. 
 This island was situated near the Straits of 
 Gades, it exceeded in magnitude all Europe 
 and Asia joined together ; it was so called 
 from Atlas the son of Neptune, the first ruler 
 of the land, and its inhabitants extended their 
 sway over all the neighbouring islands and 
 continent, and their armies passing over into 
 Europe and Africa subdued, all Libya to the 
 borders of Egypt, and all Europe to Asia 
 Minor. In succeeding ages, owing to pro- 
 digious earthquakes and inundations, all the 
 parts of Greece which your ancestors in- 
 habited were desolated and submerged, and 
 the Atlantic island itself, being suddenly ab- 
 sorbed into the bosom of the ocean, entirely 
 disappeared, and for many ages afterwards 
 that sea could not be navigated, owing to 
 the numerous rocks and shelves with which 
 it abounded^" 
 
 That the memory of the lost Atlantis re- 
 mained through many ages amongst the Greeks, 
 seems to be an undoubted fact, for we read in 
 the condensed history of their great historian 
 Grote, p. 392, of a permanent garrison being 
 planted in the island of Atalanta opposite to 
 the Lokrian coast, in order to restrain privateers 
 from the Lokrian towns in their excursions 
 
24 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 against Nubia ; it was further determined to ex- 
 pel the JEginetan inhabitants from ^gina, and 
 to occupy the island with Athenian colonists. 
 This step was partly rendered prudent by the 
 important position of the island midway be- 
 tween Attica and Peloponnesus (beginning of 
 the Peloponnesian War). 
 
 The gods and goddesses of the ancient 
 Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindoos, and the 
 Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, 
 and heroes of Atlantis, and the acts attributed 
 to them in mythology are a confused recollec- 
 tion of real historical events. The mythology of 
 Egypt and Peru represented the original religion 
 of Atlantis, which was sun worship. The 
 oldest colonies from Atlantis were probably the 
 Akkadians and Sumerians, who are thought 4*3 
 yet, according to Messrs. King and Halpto have 
 been the original founders of the Babylonian 
 and Egyptian civilization. The implements of 
 the '' Bronze Age " of Europe were derived 
 from Atlantis. The Atlantians were also the 
 first manufacturers of iron, and we know that 
 Parthelon, when he visited Ireland, came in 
 iron vessels of occidental blackness. 
 
 Baldwin says ('' Prehistoric Nations ") : 
 
 " What is usually talked of as Greek culture, 
 
 \ had its origin in Atlantis and was brought to 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 25 
 
 Athens from Asia Minor, and was richly de- 
 veloped there long before its light appeared at 
 Athens. The earliest intellectual movement 
 that found expression in the Greek language 
 was wholly Asiatic. It appeared in Ionia, the 
 country of Homer, Thales, Pythagoras, and 
 Herodotus, where during many ages, before the 
 lonians and their language became predominant, 
 another people had richly brightened the land 
 with their culture. The literature, language, 
 and sway of the older people were superseded 
 or absorbed by the Ionic family of the Greek 
 race, just as in Italy some centuries later, the 
 speech, culture, and dominion of Etruria were 
 superseded by the Komans. The cities of 
 Ionia, and of the whole coast of Asia Minor, 
 were built and occupied originally by the race 
 represented by the Phoenicians, followed by 
 the Pelasgians ; and in that beautiful region, 
 whatever culture was known to Arabia, Egypt, 
 Chaldea, and the East, received its most ele- 
 gant development. The scholars of Ionia it- 
 self studied in the schools of Phoenicia and 
 Egypt. They reached a degree of intellectual 
 independence and of progress in science never 
 equalled by any community on the other side 
 of the ^gean. 
 
 '' Herodotus showed that religion, letters, 
 
26 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 and civilization came to the Greeks from the 
 Phoenicians and Egyptians ; but in Hellas his 
 statements were severely attacked, Plutarch 
 describing them as ' The Malignity of Hero- 
 dotus ' ; and until recently, modern scholars, 
 swayed by Hellenic influence, took a similar 
 tone and treated him as an untrustworthy 
 fabler. It is now understood that no Greek 
 historian was more truthful or more intelli- 
 gent." 
 
 'The story of the submerged continent At- 
 lantis was known from earliest times to the 
 Egyptians, who claimed to be a colony of the 
 Atlantides ; and Bailly says, in his letters to 
 Voltaire, the same people were the ancestors 
 of the Phoenicians and the Britons. 
 
 The lands swallowed up by the waters were, 
 perhaps, those which united Ireland to the 
 Azores and the Azores to the continent of 
 America, for in Ireland there are the same 
 fossils, the same shells, and the same sea- 
 bodies as appear in America, and some of 
 them are found in no other part of Europe. 
 
 The old Irish to this day relate '' that a 
 great part of Ireland was swallowed up by 
 the sea on the horizon from the northern 
 coast 'y 
 
 In the North-West of Ireland they call a 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 27 
 
 city of this enchanted island Tir Hud, or the 
 City of Hud, believing one stands there which 
 once possessed all the riches of the world. 
 This island is called O'Breasil or O'Brazil 
 which signifies '' Eoyal Island," and this island 
 is supposed to have given its name to the 
 country of Brazil of South America. It is 
 evidently the lost city of Arabian story visited 
 by their Houd, namely the city and paradise 
 of Irem. 
 
 The following account of the sinking of 
 Atlantis is taken from Plongeon's translation 
 of the famous Troano MS., which may be seen 
 in the British Museum. The Troano MS. 
 appears to have been written about 3500 
 years ago, among the Mayas of Yucatan, and 
 the following is its description of the cata- 
 strophe that submerged the island of Poseidonis 
 or Atlantis. "In the year 6 Kan, on the 
 11th Mulac in the month Zao, there occurred 
 terrible earthquakes, which continued without 
 interruption until the 13th Chuen. The country 
 of the hills of Mud, the land of Mu, was 
 sacrificed; being twice upheaved it suddenly 
 disappeared during one night, the basin being 
 continually shaken by volcanic forces. Being 
 confined, these caused the land to sink and to 
 rise several times and in various places. At 
 
28 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 last the surface gave way and ten countries 
 were torn asunder and scattered ; unable to 
 stand the force of the convulsions, they sank 
 with their 64,000,000 inhabitants." 
 
 *' Ancient Egypt is full of the memory of the 
 Atlantides, and the names of their chiefs. If 
 this people came from the Canaries, we should 
 expect to find in those isles some usages similar 
 or analogous to those of Egypt. This is pre- 
 cisely what has been observed at TenerifFe — a 
 people named Guanch, a branch of the Berber 
 race of Africa, still inhabit it. They have 
 certain subterraneous vaults which they em- 
 ploy as sepulchres. Those vaults are entirely 
 shut up, and the entrance to them is a secret, 
 entrusted to a succession of old men who 
 transmit it one to another. There the dead 
 have been preserved under the form of mum- 
 mies for an unknown course of time. The 
 Guanch have the secret of embalming them 
 as well as the Egyptians, with this difference, 
 that the latter wrapped up their mummies in 
 bands charged with hieroglyphics, which no 
 doubt contained the history of the dead. 
 While the Guanch, stripping the bodies naked, 
 sewed them up in skins, they never thought 
 of inscribing history, as in all probability they 
 had not the art of writing. M. le Chevalier 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 29 
 
 de Borde brought home two of these mummies, 
 one male the other female, both in good pre- 
 servation, and found in the island of Teneriife. 
 They are deposited in the king's cabinet."^ 
 
 Recent discoveries by Profs. Garstang and 
 Sayce at Merve, show the intimate connexion 
 which formerly existed between the Atlan- 
 tides and the Ethiopians. The famous temple 
 found in the suburbs of the capital was where 
 cooked meats were set each night. There is 
 no doubt, say learned men, that this building 
 is the one referred to in the Homeric legend 
 that Zeus, King of the Atlantides, and the 
 other gods feasted every year for twelve 
 days among the blameless Ethiopians. Many 
 other buildings were also explored, and the 
 Temples of the Sun and the Kenisa were dis- 
 covered. It may be noted that the lion emblem 
 was of frequent occurrence, and may probably 
 have been the totem of the district. Many 
 beautiful objects were dug up by the expedi- 
 tion, including forty inscriptions in the hiero- 
 glyphics of Merve, two royal statues, and a 
 great many vases of a new kind of pottery, 
 objects of wood and glass, tiles and pottery. 
 
 Pritchard says : '' The extension of the Berber 
 
 1 Bailly, p. 70. 
 
30 BEGINNINGS OK GLIMPSES OF 
 
 race through the Canary Islands is a curious 
 and interesting discovery of modern times," 
 and probably forms a stepping-stone to the 
 New World in very early days by either the 
 Carthagenians or by the Berbers, for there is 
 every probability that they found their way, 
 whether by accident or design or perhaps both, 
 to South America and the Antilles. 
 
 Dr. Barth remarks that the Berbers are 
 clearly recognized as the Tamhu of the Egyp- 
 tian monuments. They were of a light colour 
 and wore ear-rings. 
 
 Proclus reports that Grantor, the first com- 
 mentator upon Plato {chxa 300 B.C.), asserted 
 that the Egyptian priests said that the story 
 of Atlantis was written on pillars which were 
 still preserved (Taylor, p. 64), and he likewise 
 quotes, from the Ethiopic History of Marcellus, 
 a statement that according to certain historians 
 there were seven islands in the external sea 
 sacred to Proserpine, and also three others of 
 great size, one sacred to Pluto, one to Ammon, 
 and another, the middle one, a thousand studia 
 in size, sacred to Neptune.^ The inhabitants 
 of it preserved the remembrance, from their 
 
 1 Procl. in Tim. (Schneider), p. 126 ; Taylor, i. p. 148 ; 
 also in Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum ed Mueller 
 (Paris, 1852, Vol. IV, p. 445). 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 31 
 
 ancestors, of the Atlantic island which existed 
 there, and was truly prodigiously great, which 
 for many periods had dominion over all the 
 islands in the Atlantic sea, and was itself sa- 
 cred to Neptune. These two passages are the 
 strongest evidence of knowledge of Atlantis 
 outside of Plato that is preserved. 
 
 In his ** Atlantis," Donnelly says : " We are 
 but beginning to understand the past ; one 
 hundred years ago, the world knew nothing of 
 Pompeii or Herculaneum. Nothing of the 
 lingual tie that binds together the Indo-Euro- 
 pean nations. Nothing of the significance of 
 the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs 
 and temples of Egypt ; nothing of Yucatan, 
 Mexico, and Peru. We are on the threshold, 
 scientific investigation is advancing with giant 
 strides. Who shall say that one hundred years 
 from now the great museums of the world 
 may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, 
 and implements from Atlantis, while the lib- 
 raries of the world shall contain translations 
 of its inscriptions throwing new light upon 
 all the past history of the human race, and 
 all the great problems which now perplex the 
 thinkers of our day ? 
 
 ''Science has but commenced its work of 
 reconstructing the past and rehabilitating the 
 
32 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 ancient peoples, and surely there is no study 
 which appeals more strongly to the imagination 
 than that of the drowned nation, the Atlantians. 
 They were the founders of nearly all our arts 
 and science ; they were the first colonizers of 
 the earth ; their civilization was old when 
 Egypt was young, and they had passed away 
 thousands of years before Babylon, E-ome, or 
 London were thought of. 
 
 " Perhaps some day the idle navies of the 
 world may be employed in bringing to the 
 light of day some of the relics of this buried 
 people. Portions of Atlantis lie but a few 
 hundred fathoms beneath the sea ; and if ex- 
 peditions have been sent out from time to 
 time in the past to resurrect from the depth 
 of the ocean sunken treasure ships, with a few 
 thousand doubloons hidden in their cabins, 
 why should not an attempt be made to reach 
 the buried wonders of Atlantis ? What would 
 more strike the imagination of mankind, than 
 an engraved tablet dredged up from Plato's 
 island."^ 
 
 lit may be that the idle navies of the world, when 
 searching for the treasures of the lost Atlantis, may find 
 evidences that the printing press, and the inventions in 
 which steam, electricity, and magnetism are used, were 
 not unknown to the Atlantides, who were the inventors of 
 everjrthing in the world after the Deluge. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 33 
 
 Atlantis. — " The farther we go back in time 
 toward the era of Atlantis, the more evidences 
 multiply that we are approaching the presence 
 of a great, wise, civilized race ". 
 
 After the earth was divided, the Atlantians 
 dwelt upon a great island, near which were 
 other smaller islands, probably east and west 
 of them, forming stepping-stones, as it were, 
 toward Europe and Africa in one direction, 
 and the West India Islands and America in 
 the other. There were volcanic mountains 
 upon the mainland, rising to a height of fifteen 
 hundred feet, with their tops covered with 
 perpetual snow. Below these were elevated 
 table-lands, upon which were the royal estab- 
 lishments. Below these again was " the great 
 plain of Atlantis". There were four rivers 
 flowing north, south, east, and west from a 
 central point. The climate was like that of 
 the Azores, mild and pleasant ; the soil volcanic 
 and fertile, and suitable at its different eleva- 
 tions for the growth of the productions of the 
 tropical and temperate zones. 
 
 ''The Atlantians possessed an established 
 
 order of priests ; their religious worship was 
 
 pure and simple. They lived under a kingly 
 
 government ; they had their courts, their judges, 
 
 their records, their monuments covered with 
 
 3 
 
34 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 inscriptions, their mines, their foundries, their 
 workshops, their looms, their grist mills, their 
 boats and sailing-vessels, their highways, aque- 
 ducts, wharves, docks, and canals. They had 
 processions, banners and triumphal arches for 
 their kings and heroes ; they built pyramids, 
 temples, round towers, and obelisks ; they 
 practised religious ablutions ; they knew the 
 use of the magnet and of gunpowder. In 
 short, they were in the enjoyment of a civili- 
 zation nearly as high as our own, lacking 
 only the printing press, and perhaps those 
 inventions in which steam, electricity, and 
 magnetism are used. 
 
 " An empire which reached from the Andes 
 to Hindustan must have been magnificent in- 
 deed. In its markets must have met the maize 
 of the Mississippi valley ; the copper of Lake 
 Superior ; the gold and silver of Africa, Peru, 
 and Mexico ; the spices of India ; the tin and 
 copper of Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland ; the 
 bronze of Iberia ; the amber of the Baltic, and 
 the wheat and barley of Greece, Italy, and 
 Switzerland."^ 
 
 The Duke of Argyll, in his book " Unity of 
 Nature ", says : " All we can see with certainty 
 is that the earliest inventions of mankind are 
 1 Donnelly. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 35 
 
 the most wonderful that the race has ever 
 made. . . . The first use of fire, and the dis- 
 covery of the methods by which it may be 
 kindled ; the domestication of wild animals, 
 and above all the processes by which the various 
 cereals were first developed out of some wild 
 grasses — these are all discoveries with which, 
 in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent 
 discoveries may compare. They are all un- 
 known to history — all lost in the light of an 
 effulgent dawn." 
 
 It was probably in Atlantis that Monotheism 
 was first preached. The proverbs of "Ptah- 
 hatep," the oldest book of the Egyptians, show 
 that this most ancient colony from Atlantis 
 received the pure faith from the motherland 
 at the very dawn of history : this book preached 
 the doctrine of one God, the rewarder of the 
 good and the punisher of the wicked ! {" At- 
 lantis," Donnelly). ~~~- — ' 
 
 Reginald S. Poole, " Contemporary Review," 
 Aug., 1881, p. 38, mentions : " In the early days 
 the Egyptians worshipped one only God, the 
 maker of all things, without beginning and 
 without end. To the last the priests preserved 
 this doctrine and taught it privately to a select 
 few " {'' Amer. Encycl.," Vol. VI, p. 463). The 
 Jews took up this great truth where the 
 
36 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 Egyptians dropped it, and over the heads and 
 over the ruins of Egypt, Chaldea, Phoenicia, 
 Greece, Eome, and India this handful of poor 
 shepherds — ignorant, debased, and despised — 
 have carried down to our own times a concep- 
 tion which could only have originated in the 
 highest possible state of human society. 
 
 Atlantis is said to have been inhabited by 
 red, yellow, white, and black races, and the 
 Almighty gave to each family a different lan- 
 guage or three distinct offshoots from the 
 original tongue in which they had spoken. 
 The researches of learned philologists confirm 
 this, showing that in course of years branch 
 dialects issued from these three, and although 
 they class them under different names, all agree 
 that the human race sprang from the three 
 branches of one parent stock. 
 
 Distinguished ethnologists who have for so 
 many years been groping in the dark in the 
 science of comparative philology, because they 
 have endeavoured to harmonize race migrations 
 with the configuration of the earth in existence 
 at the present time, may in the mystic past of 
 the lost Atlantis find the clue to what the 
 distinguished Prof Max Miiller (in his lectures 
 on the Science of Language) calls the " Aryan 
 race," "an Aryan family," and asserts that 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 37 
 
 there was a time ''when the first ancestors 
 of the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the 
 Romans, the Slavs, the Celts, and the Germans 
 were living together within the same enclosures, 
 nay under the same roof," and he argues that 
 because the same forms of speech are ''pre- 
 served by all the members of the Aryan family, 
 it follows that before the ancestors of the 
 Indians and Persians started for the South, 
 and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, 
 Teutonic, and Slavonic colonies marched to- 
 wards the shores of Europe, there was a small 
 clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest 
 elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language 
 not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German; but con- 
 taining the dialectical germs of all." 
 
 The following two paragraphs are from the 
 learned literary notes of the "Tablet". "It 
 was well said by the late Abbe de Broglie in 
 his excellent but too little known work on ' Le 
 Positivisme et les Sciences Experimentales,' 
 that even the erroneous views of early science 
 are often but an imperfect expression of a true 
 fact. And we are by no means sure that there 
 are not some cases in which the old mistaken 
 theories contain elements of truth forgotten or 
 overlooked in more enlightened days. Thus, 
 the primitive pre-scientific philologist who 
 
38 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 hastily identified Celtic with Hebrew or Phoen- 
 ician, or other Eastern tongues, is superseded 
 by the modern comparative philologist who 
 puts the language in its proper place in the 
 Indo-European system. Yet it may be that 
 the latter, though right in the main, has over- 
 looked certain facts which were seen by his 
 predecessor, who only erred by exaggerating 
 their significance." 
 
 " More recent research has modified some of 
 the views put forth somewhat too dogmatically 
 by the comparative philologists of the early 
 nineteenth century. And the Aryan group 
 is no longer isolated from other families of 
 speech. It has been recognized, moreover, 
 that even the earliest form of Celtic has in its 
 grammatical structure some traces of the in- 
 fluence of a non- Aryan tongue with which it 
 came in contact. This fact may serve in some 
 sort as a defence for the theories of our old 
 philologists. And, what is more, it lends 
 support to the suggestion that there may 
 be some substratum of historical truth in the 
 curious myths and legends that fill the first 
 pages of Keating's ' History of Ireland '." 
 
 The author of the " Origin of the Aryans *' 
 calls the opinions of Prof. Max Mtiller anti- 
 quated, and cites the labours of some French 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 39 
 
 and German scholars. He, however, confesses 
 sadly, that the opinions held by Prof. Max 
 Miiller are still held by writers of great re- 
 pute. Thus in Canon Cook's " Origins of Re- 
 ligion and Language" we find it is a fact 
 scientifically demonstrated, that the ancestors 
 of all the families belonging to this (the Aryan) 
 race must have dwelt together as one commun- 
 ity after their separation from the Semitic and 
 Hamitic branches. Surely this community 
 must have been in Atlantis. -^ ,^ 
 
 The eruption of Atlantis was a great and 
 interesting event ; from thence had come an 
 ancient race of men who it was said com- 
 manded the earth. They triumphed over 
 their enemies, and erected trophies of victory 
 after having preserved from slavery those 
 whom it menaced, and restored to all security 
 and freedom. No prince ever had or ever will 
 have such riches as (according to the Athenian 
 Solon and related by Plato) were possessed 
 by the kings of the Atlantides. The island 
 furnished in abundance all the necessaries of 
 life. It abounded in metals. The forests 
 supplied all sorts of timber for building. The 
 soil maintained numerous tribes of animals, 
 domestic as well as wild ; it fed also a vast 
 number of elephants. Plato styled the island 
 
40 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 fertile, beautiful, holy, and wonderful ; and 
 gives a detailed account of the magnificence of 
 its palaces, temples, and its kings ; he also de- 
 scribes its wonderful canals. ''The circular 
 ditch whose depth and width were so incred- 
 ible that it gave the impression that such a 
 work (in addition to so many other works) 
 could hardly have been wrought by the hand 
 of man, received the streams which came 
 down from the mountains ; also the waters 
 of innumerable straight canals which were cut 
 in the plain for the purpose of bringing down 
 the wood from the mountains to the cities. 
 Twice in the year the Atlantians gathered the 
 fruits of the earth — in winter having the bene- 
 fit of the rains, and in summer using the water 
 of the canals." 
 
 Plato also tells us that " in Atlantis there 
 was a great and wonderful empire, which ag- 
 gressed wantonly against the whole of Europe 
 and Asia, thus testifying to the extent of its 
 dominion". Moreover he tells us that "this 
 vast power was gathered into one, that is to 
 say, from Egypt to Peru it was one consoli- 
 \dated empire ". 
 
 It is interesting to know that the Atlantians, 
 according to Ignatius Donnelly, were the first 
 to domesticate the horse ; and Poseidon (Nep- 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 41 
 
 tune) their first ruler is represented in Greek 
 mythology as a sea-god, but he is figured as 
 standing in a war-chariot drawn by horses, a 
 fact which Donnelly says is inexplicable except 
 with the light given by Plato. Poseidon was 
 a sea-god because he ruled over a great land 
 in the sea, and was the national god of a mari- 
 time people ; he is associated with horses, be- 
 cause the Atlantians had great race-courses 
 for the development of speed in horses ; and 
 Poseidon is represented as standing in a war- 
 chariot, because doubtless wheeled vehicles 
 were first invented by the same people who 
 tamed the horse ; and they transmitted these 
 war-chariots to their descendants in Egypt and 
 Britain. 
 
 Several authorities think that the garden of 
 Eden was situated in either Atlantis or Lemuria, 
 and there is nothing improbable in this idea, 
 when we recollect that before the division of 
 the earth all the continents were joined to- 
 gether. 
 
 The Atlantians at first had pure and gentle 
 manners, but their incomparable discipline was 
 of short duration. They fancied they should 
 be happy in proportion to their accumulation 
 of unlawful gain ; they thought to become great 
 in proportion as they became powerful. The 
 
42 BEGINNINGS OK GLIMPSES OF 
 
 thirst for luxury and power led them to plun- 
 der nations, and they spread themselves abroad 
 upon the earth with the idea of gaining happi- 
 ness, which according to philosophers is surer 
 to be found in the field one cultivates in peace, 
 and by the hearth of one's fathers. 
 
 Diodorus Siculus and Sanchoniathon, the 
 most ancient historians after Moses, both have 
 preserved the genealogies and exploits of the 
 heroes of Atlantis ; and the Egyptians, as al- 
 ready stated, claim to be the descendants of 
 this famous people. 
 
 Kecent researches show more clearly the in- 
 disputable facts of ancient history that, long 
 before Greece became the world's intellectual 
 leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled 
 by maritime races whose adventurous enter- 
 prise led them to navigate the Atlantic. 
 
 The learned De Costa, in his " Voyages of 
 the Northmen to America," says (p. 10) : — 
 
 " In early times the Atlantic Ocean, like all 
 things without known bounds, was viewed by 
 man with mixed feelings of fear and awe. It 
 was called the Sea of Darkness. Yet never- 
 theless, there were those who professed to 
 have some knowledge of its extent, and of what 
 lay beyond. The earliest reference to this sea 
 is that by Theopompus, in the fourth century 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 43 
 
 before the Christian era, given in a fragment 
 of ^lian, where a vast island is described, 
 lying far to the west and peopled by strange 
 races." To this we may add the reference of 
 Plato ^ to the island called Atlantis which lay 
 west of the Pillars of Hercules, and which was 
 estimated to be larger than Asia and Africa 
 combined (Aristotle)/^ 
 
 The theory of the lost Atlantis has also been 
 supported by de Novo y Colsov, who went so 
 far as to predict the ultimate recovery of some 
 Atlantian manuscripts from submarine grottos 
 of some of the Atlantic islands. '' It is indeed 
 wonderful how the secret sources and springs 
 of ancient knowledge have been traced out and 
 laid bare to the gaze of all." 
 
 History records the destruction of the in- 
 habitants of Atlantis and its submersion, and 
 historians represent it as the effect of a just 
 retribution for the wickedness which had spread 
 over the land. The divine justice destroyed 
 the den whence had issued such a multitude 
 of robbers and conquerors for the misfortune 
 of the world. 
 
 " Homer, who appeared six centuries before 
 Plato, and who was well versed in the know- 
 
 ^ See Plato's "Critias and Timseus ". 
 
 2 De Mundo, cap. III. See Prince Henry the Navigator. 
 
42 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 thirst for luxury and power led them to plun- 
 der nations, and they spread themselves abroad 
 upon the earth with the idea of gaining happi- 
 ness, which according to philosophers is surer 
 to be found in the field one cultivates in peace, 
 and by the hearth of one's fathers. 
 
 Diodorus Siculus and Sanchoniathon, the 
 most ancient historians after Moses, both have 
 preserved the genealogies and exploits of the 
 heroes of Atlantis ; and the Egyptians, as al- 
 ready stated, claim to be the descendants of 
 this famous people. 
 
 Kecent researches show more clearly the in- 
 disputable facts of ancient history that, long 
 before Greece became the world's intellectual 
 leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled 
 by maritime races whose adventurous enter- 
 prise led them to navigate the Atlantic. 
 
 The learned De Costa, in his " Voyages of 
 the Northmen to America," says (p. 10) : — 
 
 " In early times the Atlantic Ocean, like all 
 things without known bounds, was viewed by 
 man with mixed feelings of fear and awe. It 
 was called the Sea of Darkness. Yet never- 
 theless, there were those who professed to 
 have some knowledge of its extent, and of what 
 lay beyond. The earliest reference to this sea 
 is that by Theopompus, in the fourth century 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 43 
 
 before the Christian era, given in a fragment 
 of JElian, where a vast island is described, 
 lying far to the west and peopled by strange 
 races." To this we may add the reference of 
 Plato 1 to the island called Atlantis which lay 
 west of the Pillars of Hercules, and which was 
 estimated to be larger than Asia and Africa 
 combined (Aristotle)/^ 
 
 The theory of the lost Atlantis has also been 
 supported by de Novo y Colsov, who went so 
 far as to predict the ultimate recovery of some 
 Atlantian manuscripts from submarine grottos 
 of some of the Atlantic islands. '' It is indeed 
 wonderful how the secret sources and springs 
 of ancient knowledge have been traced out and 
 laid bare to the gaze of all." 
 
 History records the destruction of the in- 
 habitants of Atlantis and its submersion, and 
 historians represent it as the effect of a just 
 retribution for the wickedness which had spread 
 over the land. The divine justice destroyed 
 the den whence had issued such a multitude 
 of robbers and conquerors for the misfortune 
 of the world. 
 
 '' Homer, who appeared six centuries before 
 Plato, and who was well versed in the know- 
 
 ^ See Plato's '*Critias and Timeeus ". 
 
 2 De Mundo, cap. III. See Prince Henry the Navigator. 
 
44 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 ledge of geography, mentions the Atlantides, 
 and their name was also echoed by Sanchoni- 
 athon, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Solon, 
 Eurypides, and others." 
 
 / One of the strongest testimonies to the truth 
 of Solon's story as related by his relation 
 Plato is the deep-sea soundings made in ex- 
 peditions of the British and American gun- 
 boats " Challenger " and " Dolphin ". The bed 
 of the whole Atlantic Ocean is now mapped 
 out, with the result that an immense bank or 
 ridge of great elevation is shown to exist in 
 mid-Atlantic. The ridge stretches in a south- 
 westerly direction from about fifty degrees 
 north towards the coast of South America, 
 then in a south-easterly direction towards the 
 coast of Africa, changing its direction again 
 about Ascension Island, and running due south 
 to Tristan da Cunha. The ridge rises about 
 9000 feet from the ocean depths around it, 
 while the Azores, St. Paul, Ascension, and 
 Tristan da Cunha are the peaks of this land 
 which still remain above water. A line of 
 3000 fathoms, or say 21,000 feet, is required 
 to sound the deepest parts of the Atlantic, 
 but the higher parts of the ridge are only a 
 hundred to a few hundred fathoms beneath 
 the sea. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 45 
 
 The soundings, too, showed that the ridge is 
 covered with volcanic debris of which traces 
 are to be found right across the ocean to the 
 American coasts. Indeed the fact that the 
 ocean bed, particularly about the Azores, has 
 been the scene of volcanic disturbance on a 
 gigantic scale, and that within a quite measur- 
 able period of geologic time, is conclusively 
 proved by the investigations made during the 
 above-named expeditions./ 
 
 In the ^^ Scientific American," 28 July, 1877, 
 a member of the ''Challenger" staff, in a 
 lecture delivered in London soon after the 
 termination of the expedition, expressed the 
 fullest confidence that the great submarine 
 plateau found both by the "Dolphin" and 
 ''Challenger" is the remains of the "lost 
 Atlantis," citing as proof the fact that the in- 
 equalities, the mountains and valleys of its 
 surface, could never have been produced in 
 accordance with any laws for the deposition 
 of sediment nor by submarine elevation, but, 
 on the contrary, must have been caused by 
 agencies acting above the water level. 
 
 Sir C. Wyville Thomson found that the 
 fauna of the coast of Brazil brought up in his 
 dredging machine were similar to that of the 
 western coast of South Europe. This is of 
 
46 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 particular interest since, at a short distance 
 north of the Amazon, an arm of the central 
 ridge connects the sunken plateau with the 
 coast of South America. Mr. J. Stacke 
 Gardner, the eminent English geologist, with 
 other distinguished authorities, is of the 
 opinion that in the Eocene period a great ex- 
 tension of land existed to the west of Corn- 
 wall. The extraordinary mingling of Ameri- 
 can, Asiatic, Australian, and African genera in 
 all European floras of the Tertiary period leads 
 him to the conviction that at a remote time 
 they were all connected.^ 
 
 Referring to the locations of the Dolphin 
 and Challenger ridges, he asserts that a great 
 tract of land formerly existed where the sea 
 now is, and that Cornwall, the Scilly and 
 Channel Islands, Ireland and Brittany are the 
 
 ^An important geological discovery was made during 
 Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the South Pole. 
 Mr. Priestley, who is now engaged with Captain Scott's 
 Antarctic Expedition, states that he discovered a small 
 piece of rock on the Beardmore glacier which has now 
 upon full examination turned out to belong to the arch- 
 aeocyathimal or Cambrian limestone. It appears a similar 
 formation has in recent years been discovered in Australia. 
 The fossils found in the latter and in the Antarctic are 
 identical, and the inference is that the Antarctic was once 
 united to Australia at a not very distant past. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 47 
 
 remains of its highest summits. Why, it may 
 be asked, can we say that the great Atlantic 
 ridges ever occupied a higher altitude than at ^^ 
 present ? According to the following theory of 
 Prof. Joseph le Coute, the answer is found : 
 " Any increase in the height and extent of the 
 whole amount of land on the globe must be, 
 attended with a corresponding depression of 
 the sea bottoms." 
 
 Major Wilford remarks, in the 8th vol. 
 '' Asiatic Researches," that '' it is well known 
 to the learned that at a very remote period 
 Europe and Africa were considered as but one 
 of the grand divisions of the world, and that 
 the appellation Africa was even extended to 
 the western parts of Europe, all along the 
 shores of the Atlantic." He also points out 
 the almost forgotten tradition, that the word 
 Africa comes from Aphar, a term used in 
 times gone by to signify ''The West". Just 
 as we now, continuing the ancient method of 
 designation, call most of the Asiatic World 
 *' The East ". It is only since the time of the 
 Romans that the word Africa has become a 
 name for one of the grand divisions of the 
 globe. 
 
 Major Wilford gives an interesting account 
 of the ancient knowledge of the two old San- 
 
50 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 this intercourse was interrupted by political 
 changes throughout the Mediterranean world, 
 of which history can give no explanation. All 
 this was very much older than Assyria. Traces 
 of it remain in the oldest myths and records 
 of Greece, India, and Egypt, which, however, 
 do not fully reveal their significance to those 
 who cannot see the antiquity and importance 
 of the Cushite civilization of Arabia. Its 
 origin and history were doubtless fully de- 
 scribed in the ancient Phoenician records, but 
 the language in which these records were 
 written must have become a dead language 
 before the Assyrian Empire appeared. 
 
 Sun and fire worship became the cult of the 
 Atlantians, for the celebration of which mag- 
 nificent temples were built throughout the 
 length and breadth of the continent of At- 
 lantis, but more especially in the great " City 
 of the Golden Gates " — the temple service 
 being performed by retinues of priests endowed 
 by the State for that purpose. 
 
 " For some time religion was comparatively 
 pure and the priests did their utmost to keep 
 alive in the hearts of the people the spiritual 
 life. Evil days, however, were drawing near 
 when no altruistic idea should remain to re- 
 deem the race from the abyss of selfishness 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 51 
 
 in which it was destined to be overwhelmed. 
 The decay of the ethical idea was the neces- 
 sary prelude to the perversion of the spiritual. 
 The hand of every man fought for himself 
 alone, and his knowledge was used for purely 
 selfish ends, till it became an established belief 
 that there was nothing in the universe greater 
 or higher than themselves. Each man was 
 his own '' Law, and Lord, and God," and the 
 very worship of the temples ceased to be the 
 worship of any ideal, but became the mere 
 adoration of man as he was known and seen 
 to be. Shrines were placed in temples in 
 which the statue of each man, wrought in gold 
 or silver, or carved in stone or wood, was 
 adored by himself. 
 
 " The richer men kept whole trains of priests 
 in their employ for the cult and care of their 
 shrines, and ofiPerings were made to these 
 statues as to gods. The apotheosis of self 
 could go no further.^ 
 
 '' Another terrible development of these times 
 was the practice of sorcery ; many of the in- 
 habitants, had of course become aware of the 
 existence of powerful elementary creatures, 
 who had been called into being, or at least 
 
 1 Elliott's "Atlantis". 
 4* 
 
52 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 animated by their own powerful wills, which, 
 being directed towards maleficent ends, natur- 
 ally produced the elementals of power and 
 malignity. So degraded had then become 
 man's feelings of reverence and worship that 
 they actually began to adore the semi-con- 
 scious creations of their own malignant thought. 
 The ritual with which these beings worshipped 
 was blood-stained from the very start, and of 
 course every sacrifice offered at their shrine 
 gave vitality and persistence to these vampire- 
 like creations, so much so that even to the 
 present day in various parts of the world, the 
 elementals formed by the powerful will of 
 these old Atlantian sorcerers still continue 
 to exact their tribute from unoffending village 
 communities. 
 
 '' The Akkadians though they became even- 
 tually supreme rulers of Atlantis, owed their 
 birthplace to the neighbouring continent, that 
 part occupied by the basin of the Mediter- 
 ranean about the present Island of Sardinia 
 being their special home. From this centre 
 they spread eastwards, occupying what eventu- 
 ally became the shores of the Levant and 
 reaching as far as Persia and Arabia. They 
 also helped to people Egypt. The early Etrus- 
 cans, the Phoenicians, including the Carthagen- 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 53 
 
 ians and the Sliumero-Akkads were branches 
 of this race, while the Basques of to-day have 
 probably more of the Akkadian than of any 
 other blood which flows in their veins. It is 
 supposed that it was the Akkadians who 
 founded Stonehenge and other Druidical re- 
 mains in the British Isles. The rude simplicity 
 of Stonehenge and other stone circles like that 
 on the grounds of Killiney Park near Dublin 
 were intended as a protest against the extrav- 
 agant ornament and over-decoration of the 
 existing temples in Atlantis, where the debased 
 worship of their own images was being carried 
 on by the inhabitants. 
 
 "The Mongolians never had any touch with 
 the mother-country. Born on the wide plains 
 of Tartary, their emigrations for long found 
 ample scope within those regions. The pres- 
 ence of Mongolian blood in some tribes of 
 North American Indians has also been recog- 
 nized by various writers on ethnology. The 
 Hungarians and Malays are both known to be 
 off-shoots of this race, ennobled in the one case 
 by a strain of Aryan blood, degraded in the 
 other by mixture with the effete Letnurians. 
 But the interesting fact about the Mongolians 
 is that its last family race is still in full force, 
 it has not in fact yet reached its zenith, and 
 
54 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 the Japanese nation has still got history to give 
 to the world. 
 
 " For the practice of sun worship, the At- 
 lantians repaired to the hill-tops. There they 
 built great circles of upright monoliths. They 
 were intended to be symbolical of the sun's 
 yearly course, but they were also used for 
 astronomical purposes, being so that, to one 
 standing at the high altar, the sun would rise 
 at the winter solstice behind one of these 
 monoliths, at the vernal equinox behind an- 
 other, and so on throughout the year. Astro- 
 nomical observations of a still more complex 
 character, connected with the more distant 
 constellations, were also helped by those stone 
 circles." 
 
 Says Donnelly : '' We must acknowledge 
 that the Atlantides have had a mighty influence 
 over the old world. If those names of fable 
 be merely allegorical, everything ingenious in 
 them belongs to the Atlantides ; if the fable 
 be a real tradition, but has been altered in its 
 descent, ancient history is entirely theirs ; they 
 have executed, they have produced everything 
 in Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, and 
 their traces subsist in the ruins of monuments 
 consecrated to the usages which this people 
 prescribed. Facts, then, as they accumulate, 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 55 
 
 render them still more interesting. However, 
 this people is lost, as well as they who were 
 the authors of the sciences ; they have no longer 
 an asylum on earth ; everything whispers their 
 memory, except the country which they left for 
 the conquest of a part of the universe. This 
 silence of their country surprises one ; it must 
 have remained desert, or it must have disap- 
 peared, as Plato informs us." 
 
 The same great mind, speaking of the tradi- 
 tions of the Greeks {" Dialogues, Laws," 104, 
 p. 713), says : " There is a tradition of the happy 
 life of mankind in the days when all things 
 were spontaneous and abundant. . . . Chronos, 
 however, knew that no human nature, invested 
 with supreme power, is able to order human 
 affairs and not overflow with insolence and 
 wrong". Chronos of the Chronian Sea (the 
 Atlantic) King of Atlantis. 
 
56 BEGINNI]?;[GS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A FEW years ago writers dated North American 
 history from the discoveries made by Columbus 
 and his immediate successors. Now they go 
 back to the Irish Danes and Northmen for a 
 starting-point. But the beginning may be 
 pushed much farther back, even to the time 
 mentioned in the tenth chapter of Genesis, v. 
 25, '' He was called Phaleg, etc., for in his days 
 was the earth divided". McCulloch, in his 
 '' Researches on America," proceeds to examine 
 the different evidence and circumstances which 
 appear to support the opinion as to the division 
 of the earth and the submerged land. He says 
 " that the manner this verse is explained in the 
 different commentaries on the Bible is certainly 
 incorrect, for they confounded it with the events 
 related of the confusion of language at Babel ". 
 The learned historian, W. Cullen Bryant, was 
 the first to show there was an evident distinc- 
 tion to be made between the event related 
 of Phaleg and that of the confusion and con- 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 57 
 
 sequent dispersion of man from the Plain of 
 Shinar. 
 
 To show the difference between the event 
 which was said to have happened in Phaleg s 
 days and that of the confusion of Babel, he re- 
 marks, after mentioning from Genesis, chapter 
 ten ; ''In the days of Phaleg was the earth 
 divided, and the sons of Noah were distin- 
 guished in their generations, in their nations, 
 and by these were the nations divided in the 
 earth, after the flood ". But in the history of 
 the confusion of Babel, it is translated, " So the 
 Lord scattered them abroad, from hence (that 
 is from the city and tower) did the Lord scatter 
 them abroad ". Certainly two different events. 
 
 ''In Phaleg's days it is the earth which is 
 said to have been divided ; in the history of the 
 Tower of Babel it is the people who were con- 
 founded and scattered, two very different rela- 
 tions, the one of human beings, the other of the 
 earth. The word Babel means confusion, the 
 word Phaleg is translated sever and divide." 
 
 As the significance of the word Phaleg is 
 of very considerable importance, McCulloch 
 makes a minute investigation of it. According 
 to M. Bryant the explanation is to sever and 
 divide. 
 
 From the etymology of this word, and the 
 
58 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 general signification of the expression, are we 
 not to conclude, says McCulloch, that there is 
 no reference to a division of men, but to the 
 division of land. 
 
 " The building of the Tower of Babel took 
 place about 500 years after the Deluge, and as 
 there were then many thousand persons in 
 existence, it is not difficult to believe they had 
 made some advancement in the arts and even 
 the sciences. We read that the descendants 
 of Cain, before the Deluge, had discovered 
 the art of working metals, that they invented 
 instruments of music, that they built and lived 
 in cities, a fact which alone must establish the 
 possession of a great degree of knowledge ; for 
 what a number of arts, etc., must have neces- 
 sarily existed to build and support a city. Con- 
 sidering these circumstances, we cannot suppose 
 that arts like these so useful and so necessary 
 to mankind would be forgotten and disregarded 
 in after times. Before entering the ark Noah 
 and his sons must have had frequent oppor- 
 tunities of seeing and judging of the inventions, 
 etc., of the antediluvians, and of course must 
 have retained many of them." 
 
 Sacred history mentions nothing useless or 
 superfluous, its object was religion, and there- 
 fore it only glances at other subjects. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 59 
 
 " Several very learned men have supposed the 
 antediluvians to have had a system of as- 
 tronomy, a trade, commerce, etc., and to have 
 made much more advancement in the arts and 
 sciences than is generally attributed to them ; 
 thus satisfactorily accounting for the great 
 progress made by the Chaldeans, Sumerians, 
 Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindoos, Phoenicians, 
 Celts, etc., so shortly after the Deluge. 
 
 "The most unequivocal proof, hovrever, of 
 the state of antediluvian science is found in the 
 celebrated work of Noah, the building of the 
 ark. This vessel, reckoning 18 inches only to 
 the cubit, by which it is described, would be of 
 the enormous burden of 42,413 tons. Now, 
 though the command to construct such a vessel 
 in the heart of a continent might well be, as it 
 was, divine, and some directions were appended 
 to the command respecting its size and structure, 
 we apprehend that no person who has not been 
 professionally accustomed to shipbuilding in 
 our times would very successfully engage in the 
 task of the patriarch, upon his instructions; 
 and we have no reason to suppose there was 
 anything supernatural in his skill." 
 
 Adam died in the year of the world (i.e. in 
 the renovation of the earth from its chaotic 
 state) (Gen. I.-II.) 930, and would consequently 
 
60 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 be contemporary with Lamech, the father of 
 Noah, for a period of fifty-six years. In like 
 manner, Shem, the son of Noah, would be con- 
 temporary with Isaac for fifty years. Whatever 
 knowledge God communicated direct to Adam 
 was transmitted to Noah by his father Lamech. 
 
 The traditions of the Deluge and the building 
 of the Tower of Babel are to be found among 
 all the ancient nations. 
 
 According to Smith's ''Ancient History," 
 based on the biblical account, the material 
 civilization of the world was begun by the race 
 of Ham, put to the highest uses by the race of 
 Shem, "and, if the phrase may be allowed, 
 popularized and made the handmaid of ener- 
 getic progress, by the race of Japhet, to whom 
 Noah's prophecy gave the highest development 
 of worldly greatness ". 
 
 The post-diluvians were not to confine them- 
 selves to any one particular district, as they 
 evidently wished to do. Thus the Almighty, 
 to frustrate their intention, gave to each family 
 a different language, or three distinct offshoots 
 from the original tongue in which they had 
 spoken. 
 
 The researches of learned philologists ^ con- 
 
 1 Including Cuvier, Pritchard, Prof. Eask, Max Miiller, 
 Sir William Jones, Fr. Hogan, S.J., etc. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 61 
 
 firm this, showing that, in course of years, 
 branch dialects issued from these three. And 
 although they class them under different names, 
 all agree that the human race sprang from the 
 three branches of one parent stock. 
 
 Those primitive languages are clearly traced 
 to the Chaldean. 
 
 The ark of Noah having continued upon the 
 bosom of the watery element during a complete 
 year, and the flood having universally subsided, 
 Holy Scripture informs us that it rested upon 
 the mountains of Ararat. By Ararat is gener- 
 ally understood Armenia, as translated by the 
 Vulgate. 
 
 Sacred text does not say that the ark rested 
 upon Mount Ararat, but uses the word in the 
 plural number, which, in the opinion of many 
 learned writers, including Maurice and H. Ban- 
 croft, only implies that it rested upon one of 
 the mountains of that vast chain which was 
 distinguished by different appellations in the 
 various countries through which it passed, and 
 which near its western rise was known to the 
 inhabitants of ancient Syria by that of Ararat. 
 This conjecture, says Maurice, will appear less 
 improbable when it is considered how custom- 
 ary it has been for high and extensive ridges 
 of mountains, by whatever name in particular 
 
62 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 regions demonstrated, to be distinguished by 
 one general appellation. Thus in Africa the 
 immense chain of mountains extending from 
 the great western ocean as far as Egypt is 
 called Atlas, and thus in South America the 
 still more stupendous chain running from 
 north to south for above four thousand miles 
 together along the coast of the Pacific Ocean 
 is called the Andes. 
 
 '* The Semitic and Japhetic (i.e. Aryan) fami- 
 lies moved off to the north, west, and east, fol- 
 lowing the rivers and valleys, gradually getting 
 separated by increasing numbers in course 
 of years, and radiating from their respective 
 centres. New dialects were rapidly developed 
 as they became lost to one another by the screen 
 of the great mountain ranges and their ever- 
 increasing distance."^ 
 
 The Babylonian and Egyptian civilization 
 was formerly considered the earliest in the 
 world, but now, thanks to the wonderful exca- 
 vations made by M. de Larzec at Lello between 
 1877 and 1900, and continued for some months 
 by Captain Gaston Cros, preceded by Messrs. 
 Loftus and Taylor (who did not achieve so 
 complete results), we have, as shown by Messrs. 
 
 1 Palmer's ''Shinar". 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 63 
 
 King, Department of Assyrian Antiquities, 
 British Museum, and Hall, in Egypt and Western 
 Asia, in the light of recent discoveries, and Mr. 
 King's learned and fascinating book recently 
 published, ^' Sumer and Akkad," an account of 
 the Sumerians, founders of that Babylonian and 
 Egyptian civilization, perhaps the same people 
 who built the wonderful temples in Central 
 and South America, and who probably crossed 
 Europe even as far as Britain and Ireland, for 
 in this latter country graves have been found 
 with the same characteristics as those of the 
 Sumerians. "The Sumerian practice of burial 
 has been proved," says King, '' that the corpse 
 was regularly arranged for burial in the con- 
 tracted position, in a sitting posture or lying on 
 its side, while the Egyptian corpses were always 
 placed at full length " (see " Irish Burials "). 
 One of the earliest Sumerian rulers, Lugal- 
 Zaggisi, boasts that he reached beyond what is 
 now the Mediterranean coast, and his expedi- 
 tion merely formed the prelude to the conquest 
 of Syria by Shar-Gani-Sharri of Akkad. 
 
 " The book ' Egypt and Western Asia ' tells 
 us that the Sumerians, as they are called, are 
 thought as yet to have been the aboriginal 
 inhabitants of Babylonia. The Babylonian 
 elements of culture, which the early Semitic 
 
64 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 invaders brought with them to Egypt, were 
 ultimately of Sumerian origin. Sumerian civi- 
 lization had profoundly influenced the Semitic 
 tribes for centuries before the Semitic conquest 
 of Babylonia, and the Sumerians were con- 
 quered by an alien race but not by an alien 
 culture. For the culture of the Semites was 
 Sumerian, the Semitic races owing their civili- 
 zation to the Sumerians. According to Mr. 
 H. M. Hall, bodies in crouched positions have 
 been found in Farah and in Southern Babylonia 
 and in Egypt. Also, evidently, it was the 
 earliest mode of burial, and was brought to 
 Ireland by the earliest migrations from the 
 East." 
 
 In '* Sumer and Akkad," Mr. King says : 
 ^'Perhaps the most important achievement of 
 the Sumerians was the invention of cuneiform 
 writing, for this in time was adopted as a 
 common script throughout the East, and be- 
 came the parent of other systems of the same 
 character. 
 
 "But scarcely less important were their 
 legacies in other spheres of activity. In the 
 arts of sculpture and seal engraving, their 
 own achievements were notable enough, and 
 they inspired the Semitic work of later 
 times. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 65 
 
 "The great code of Hammurabi's laws, 
 which is claimed to have influenced Western 
 codes, is now definitely known to have been 
 of Sumerian origin, and Urukagina's legislative 
 effort was the direct forerunner of Ham- 
 murabi's more successful appeal to past tradi- 
 tion. The literature of Babylon and Assyria 
 is based almost throughout on Sumerian 
 originals, and the ancient ritual of the Sum- 
 erian cults survived in the later temples of 
 both countries. 
 
 " Sumer in fact was the principal source of 
 Babylonian civilization, and a study of its cul- 
 ture supplies a key to that of the whole world, 
 especially that of Western Asia. 
 
 ''The excavations carried out in Babylonia 
 and Assyria during the last few years have 
 added immensely to our knowledge of the 
 early history of those countries, and have revo- 
 lutionized many of the ideas current with re- 
 gard to the age and character of Babylonian 
 civilization." 
 
 The same interesting and learned book also 
 shows how the primitive conditions of life 
 were gradually modified, and how from rude 
 beginnings there was developed the compar- 
 atively advanced civilization which was in- 
 herited by the later Babylonians and Assyrians 
 
 5 
 
66 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 and exerted a remarkable influence upon other 
 races of the ancient world. 
 
 Sumerian culture was carried far beyond 
 the limits of Babylonia. 
 
 The original home of the race is to be 
 sought beyond the mountains to the east of 
 the Babylonian plain. The excavations con- 
 ducted at Anan near Askhabad by the second 
 Pumpelly Expedition have revealed traces of 
 pre-historic culture in that region, which pre- 
 sent some striking parallels to other early cul- 
 ture west of the Iranian Plateau. Moreover, 
 the physiological evidence collected by the 
 first Pumpelly Expedition affords an adequate 
 explanation of the racial unrest in Central 
 Asia, which probably gave rise to the Sumerian 
 immigration and to other subsequent migra- 
 tion from the East. 
 
 Mr. King also suggests that contact may 
 have taken place between the Sumerians and 
 the pre-historic peoples of North Africa and 
 Western Asia. But far closer were the ties 
 which connected Sumer with Elam, the next 
 neighbour of Chaldea, the great centre of civil- 
 ization which lay upon the eastern border ; 
 and recent excavations in Persia have disclosed 
 the extent to which each civilization was of 
 independent development. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 67 
 
 "It was only after the Semitic conquest 
 that Sumerian culture had a marked effect on 
 that of Elam, and Semitic influence persisted 
 in the country even under Sumerian domina- 
 tion. It was also through the Semitic in- 
 habitants of Northern Babylonia that cultural 
 elements from both Sumer and Elam passed 
 beyond the Taurus, and after being assimilated 
 by the Hittites, reached the western and 
 south-western coasts of Asia Minor. 
 
 "An attempt has therefore been made to 
 estimate, in the light of recent discoveries, the 
 manner in which Babylonian culture affected 
 the early civilizations of Egypt, Asia, and the 
 West. Whether through direct or indirect 
 channels, the cultural influence of Sumer and 
 Akkad was felt in varying degrees through- 
 out an area extending from Elam to the 
 ^gean." 
 
 The honour of first peopling America has 
 frequently been given to Noah and his imme- 
 diate descendants. 
 
 "Noah's Ark," says Ulloa, "gave rise to a 
 number of such constructions, and the experi- 
 ence gained during the patriarch's voyage em- 
 boldened his descendants to seek strange lands 
 in the same manner." Driven to America 
 and the neighbouring islands by winds and 
 
68 BEGINNINGS OK GLIMPSES OF 
 
 currents, they found it difficult to return, and 
 so remained and peopled the land. 
 
 Many learned authorities, on the contrary, 
 think it more probable that Noah's sons came 
 to America by land ; and believe that the 
 continents were not disconnected until some 
 time after the Flood, by which time America 
 was peopled from the old world. 
 
 So far from being a dreary waste, the past 
 of the vast American continent is full of inter- 
 est, and the charm surrounding the events and 
 people of the days gone by is ever increased 
 by the lapse of time. The past would in truth 
 be a desert if the people who preceded us had 
 not left their records upon hill and plain and 
 stone to mark their glories, their woes, and the 
 struggles to gain that for which men still strive. 
 
 The Americas afford a rich field for anti- 
 quaries as well as geologists ; some of the 
 most distinguished of the latter (foremost 
 amongst whom may be mentioned Profs. 
 Louis Agassiz and Alexander Humboldt) say, 
 that before the plains of Europe rose above 
 the primeval seas, the continent which is now 
 called America emerged from the watery 
 waste that they think encircled the whole globe, 
 and they give abundant proof of its hoary age, 
 though not of its early civilization. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 69 
 
 Savants who have occupied themselves seri- 
 ously with the American antiquities know 
 that these last rival in importance and grandeur 
 the most celebrated monuments of Babylonia, 
 Egypt, Assyria, Hindustan, Greece, and Rome. 
 
 When the Almighty confounded the lan- 
 guage of mankind at Babel, and obliged them 
 to scatter over the earth, the same ideas of re- 
 ligion, the same arts, knowledge, manners, etc., 
 were common to all ; and these were carried 
 to the difiFerent parts of the world, which Pro- 
 vidence had assigned to particular tribes and 
 families. 
 
 Notwithstanding the desire of several Ameri- 
 can scientists, who claim for the early inhabi- 
 tants of their country an indigenous origin, the 
 researches of learned men in latter days, whose 
 writings cannot be gainsaid, testify that all 
 races of men are brethren ; that we are of 
 *^ one blood," and that our common father was 
 made in the "likeness of God," "a, little lower 
 than the angels " ; and instead of being created 
 in a low savage state he was, on the contrary, 
 endowed with the greatest intelligence, moulded 
 in perfect symmetry and physical beauty : in 
 fact, the last, and certainly the most wonderful, 
 of the Creator's handiwork. 
 
 According to the Bible, the period which the 
 
70 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 antediluvians possessed the earth was 2232 
 years ; and by the authority of the fourth chap- 
 ter of Genesis they had made no inconsiderable 
 progress in the arts and sciences, as has been 
 already mentioned. This will account for the 
 great progress made by Chaldeans, Egyptians, 
 Phoenicians, Greeks, Hindoos, etc., so shortly 
 affer the Deluge. 
 
 "^ The resemblance of nation to nation has 
 seemed inexplicable. Authors, to explain it, 
 have formed theories, giving all the inventions, 
 knowledge, etc., to the one people, the Atlan- 
 tides, and deriving the information of other 
 nations from them. 
 
 Hence Lord Bacon's idea (since confirmed 
 by many learned historians, including Sir 
 William Jones, see ''Asiatic Researches") 
 that the ancient nations, etc., had received 
 their knowledge from some nation more an- 
 cient than their own, and he believed that all 
 learning, etc., emanated from Chaldea. 
 
 It may be asked, why then do nations differ 
 so much in their religious systems if having one 
 common origin with those of other people ? It 
 is answered that as idolatrous worship is taken 
 almost wholly from objects before our eyes, 
 when we remove to other situations where we 
 have not those appearances and objects that 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 71 
 
 gave rise to particular custom we endeavour to 
 suit them to the present face of things, or some 
 would drop them entirely, others would retain 
 them, though they forgot what superstition 
 they arose from. 
 
72 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 According to the Pentateuch, the descend- 
 ants of Noah were destined by God to over- 
 spread the whole earth. The most ancient 
 genealogical tree of the human race is found in 
 the fifth chapter of Genesis — the generations 
 of Adam — and the next that is given is in the 
 tenth chapter. Sacred history gives the first 
 accounts of the original formation of nations ; 
 these are the most ancient, and serve as the 
 only infallible guide in the knowledge of an- 
 tiquity. 
 
 Astronomical legends of Oriental empires are 
 those which gave rise to the wildest fables in 
 the whole range of ancient mythology, and all 
 the early Eastern records, including the Per- 
 sian, etc., according to M. Bailly and Sir William 
 Jones (^' Asiatic Researches "), are equally un- 
 reliable. 
 
 It is very remarkable that in all the ancient 
 chronology the age of the world is divided in- 
 to four grand periods, but, according to wild 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 73 
 
 Eastern ideas, of astonishing duration. Maurice, 
 in his ''History of Hindustan," says : '' The Hin- 
 doos called each of these periods Yugs — the 
 first, the Latya Yug, the age of purity, is said 
 to have lasted 3,200,000 years ; and they say in 
 this age men lived to the age of 100,000 years. 
 " The second is called the Treta Yug — that 
 is the age in which one-third part of man- 
 kind became reprobate. This Yug consisted of 
 2,400,000 years, and that men in this period 
 lived to the age of 10,000 years. The third is 
 styled the Dwaper Yug, or the age in which 
 half of the human race became depraved. This 
 lasted 1,600,000 years, and in this Yug the life 
 of man was reduced to 1000 years. The name 
 of the fourth or present age is Cah-Yug, in 
 which all mankind are depraved, or rather 
 lessened, according to the derivation of the 
 word Cah given by Mr. Holwell. The 
 Hindoos say that Cah-Yug is to last 400,000 
 years, of which they say more than 5000 years 
 have already passed, and judiciously remark 
 that in this age the life of man has been re- 
 duced to the very contracted period of 100 
 years, and the Brahmins predict every species 
 of wickedness to take place before the expira- 
 tion of it " (from Maurice's " History of Hindu- 
 stan "). 
 
74 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 Certain it is that of all the sciences astronomy 
 appears to have been early known in great per- 
 fection, and, according to Maurice and most 
 learned astronomers, first reared its head, not 
 in Egypt, Persia, or Greece, but in the earliest 
 region tenanted by the renovated race of man. 
 It was necessary for the pursuits of husbandry 
 that the Chaldean shepherds should diligently 
 observe the orbs of heaven ; their alternate 
 rising and setting ; their opposition and con- 
 junction ; their emersion and setting. In its 
 original outline simple and rude, by degrees 
 it became vast, a profound and complicated 
 science. The principles and practice of astron- 
 omy, thus commencing in Chaldea, were ex- 
 tended and amplified by the daring navigators 
 of Phoenicia, and in succeeding ages by the 
 philosophers of Persia, India, Greece, and 
 Egypt were carried to the utmost point of per- 
 fection attainable in these remote periods. 
 
 Costard, who is considered one of the most 
 profound Oriental astronomers that ever flour- 
 ished, supports Maurice in his opinions with 
 regard to the wonderful imaginations of the 
 " presumptuous Brahmins," as he called them, 
 who claimed for India as being the first civi- 
 lization of the world, and for their country 
 an unfathomable antiquity. M. Costard found 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 75 
 
 that their assertions relative to the earth's 
 antiquity had no foundation but in the great 
 solar and lunar cycles, or planetary revolutions, 
 and that Chaldea, and not India, was the 
 parent country of mankind. 
 
 In proof of this assertion a few remarkable 
 instances are there produced, upon the autho- 
 rity of Sir William Jones, which evince the 
 primitive languages of Chaldea and India not 
 to be greatly dissimilar, that the name of Adam 
 may be traced to the Sanskrit root, Adim, or 
 the first. Nuh may be recognized for the 
 patriarch Noah, and that their great hero, Bali, 
 is the Bel or Baal of their neighbours, from 
 whence the Irish word for the month of May 
 is derived — Bels Fire — ^probably because the 
 sun was commencing in that month to show 
 himself in Ireland. 
 
 The Egyptians and Greeks both claim for 
 their respective countries the honour of being 
 the first astronomers, but Costard points out 
 the high improbability of the Egyptians or 
 Greeks being the inventors of a form and order 
 of the constellations which are, in many re- 
 spects, totally inapplicable to the climate of 
 Egypt. The consequence is that their ancestors 
 must have brought a sphere fabricated, for the 
 use of agriculture and navigation, from some 
 
76 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 primeval country inhabited by them before their 
 migration to the banks of the Nile ; and ^' that 
 primeval country, we are informed," says 
 Maurice, " from the most sacred authority, was 
 Chaldea". 
 
 It was the fashion for many years for anti- 
 quarians to try to prove the wonderful ages of 
 the civilization of various countries — millions 
 of years were as nothing to them — according 
 to many learned men the Bible was only a 
 beautiful poem whose dates were not to be re- 
 lied upon, and, alas 1 much harm was done by 
 the writings of these distinguished authorities 
 which will take time to eradicate, for all are 
 not so honest as the great Hindu scholar, Mr. 
 Halhed, the translator of the code of Hindu 
 laws, a work whose preface, says Maurice in 
 his "History of Hindustan," p. 88, ''shows the 
 deepest Oriental erudition, and who is con- 
 sidered perhaps the most learned of writers on 
 Hindu chronology ". 
 
 Before minutely investigating the principles 
 upon which that chronology is founded, Halhed 
 exclaimed : — 
 
 "Computation is lost and conjecture over- 
 whelmed, in the attempt to adjust such as- 
 tonishing spaces of time, to our confined notion 
 of the world's epoch ; to such antiquity the 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 77 
 
 Mosaic creation is but as yesterday, and to such 
 ages the life of Methuselah is no more than a 
 span." " But Mr. Halhed," says Maurice, " was 
 soon on further investigations convinced of the 
 futility of the claims to unfathomable antiquity 
 of the presumptuous Brahmins," and requested 
 Maurice to announce to the public his altered 
 sentiments on this point ; and, says Maurice, 
 " one cannot fail to honour an author who thus 
 voluntarily stands forth in so decided and manly 
 a manner, to prevent the further circulation of 
 a dangerous error under the sanction of his dis- 
 tinguished name ". Every sceptical hypothesis, 
 therefore, raised upon this basis of conjecture, 
 relative to the immense period of the world's 
 duration, and the antiquity of the Indian nation, 
 promulgated in his work, of necessity falls to 
 the ground ; and one source of infidelity is thus 
 happily annihilated. 
 
 All great authorities consider that the 
 wonderful dates of the Hindus and the 
 Brahmins and also other Eastern records owe 
 their origin to the astronomical reveries of 
 the ancient founders of Babel, whose blind 
 veneration for the great regal patriarchs early 
 introduced the belief that their souls were 
 translated into certain of the heavenly bodies, 
 from which lofty stations they still continued 
 
78 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 to overlook the afifairs of mortals. Hence the 
 Cuthic Phoenicians were accustomed to style 
 the celestial luminaries, ''Speculators of the 
 Heavens ". 
 
 The stories of the lost countries, Atlantis in 
 the north, and Lemuria in the south, which 
 joined the old world with the new, serve, in 
 the opinion of most learned men of the present 
 day, to account for the origin of the American 
 Indians, and the different animals of that vast 
 continent. 
 
 Many of the inhabitants and animals of 
 Atlantis were engulfed in the great cata- 
 strophe which sunk that great island, but many 
 others escaped and remained separated from 
 the rest of the world, and from this fact the earli- 
 est writers, including the celebrated d'Acosta, 
 account for the origin of the American Indians 
 and the variety of the animals found on that 
 continent. He says that the people and animals 
 saved in the ark spread gradually by these 
 routes over the whole world. 
 
 Clavigero shows that upheavals, engulfings, 
 and separations of land have been quite 
 common in Central America, and thinks that 
 American traditions of destructions refer to 
 such disasters. He also shows that certain 
 animals could have passed only by a tropical, 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 79 
 
 others only by an arctic road ; that there remains 
 no other solution to this intricate question than 
 by admitting an ancient union between the 
 equinoctial countries of America and those of 
 Africa by the submerged continent Lemuria, 
 or the dead country, and a connexion of the 
 northern countries of America with Europe on 
 the east and Asia on the west, by the lost 
 Atlantis ; so that he says there has been prob- 
 ably a period since the Flood when there was 
 but one continent, thus agreeing with other 
 great authorities as to the truth of what is 
 called the myth of Atlantis of the submerging 
 of a vast tract of land in early times. In these 
 days it is not impossible for us to suppose the 
 occurrence of an earthquake, or possibly a suc- 
 cession of shocks, so violent as to submerge 
 a tract of land 1500 miles in length which, 
 according to Clavigero, united Africa and South 
 America (Brazil). It is well known that these 
 convulsions are common in the climates where 
 this land is supposed to have been. History 
 even at the present day shows many examples 
 of effects produced by earthquakes. The earth- 
 quake that was felt in Canada in 1663 over- 
 turned a chain of mountains upwards of 300 
 miles in length, converting the whole of that 
 immense tract into one entire plain. How 
 
80 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 prodigious must have been the convulsions 
 occasioned by those extraordinary earthquakes 
 recorded in the histories of America, when the 
 world was thought to be on the verge of dis- 
 solution ! 
 
 Again in later times we have the great 
 earthquake in Lisbon, in which 70,000 lives 
 were lost, the destruction of the cities of San 
 Francisco, Valparaiso, Messina, and that of 
 Krakatoa in the Straits of Sunda, in which 
 thousands perished. 
 
 On 20 December, 1910, Prof. Milne, F.RS., 
 the eminent seismologist, of Shide, Isle of 
 Wight, states : — 
 
 " After a long period of rest we have had a 
 succession of large earthquakes. 
 
 " On the 13th inst. there was one on the 
 west coast of Africa, which broke several 
 cables, and on the 14th inst. one in Scotland. 
 On the 16th inst. one occurred as far off as 
 New Guinea. 
 
 "On the 17th inst., at 7.30a.m., one reached 
 us from a place as far distant as the West 
 Indies. Next day, at 4 a.m., one came from 
 Java, and in less than two hours, namely at 
 
 5.49 a.m., there was another disturbance in 
 the West Indies. There was a third at 
 
 4.50 P.M. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 81 
 
 " With the exception of the disturbance in 
 Scotland they were all very large and shook 
 quite half the world." 
 
 Hurricanes and earthquakes were common 
 in America. One hundred and fifty-eight 
 years after the great hurricane which is said 
 to have taken place 1715 years after the Flood, 
 there was another destruction of this land, 
 which was of the Guinamentin giants who 
 lived in New Spain ; this destruction was a 
 great trembling of the earth which swallowed 
 up and killed them, the mountains and vol- 
 canoes burst upon them, that for a certainty 
 none should escape.^ 
 
 Veytia and Clavigero are convinced that this 
 name Guinamentin is not to be accepted liter- 
 ally. While some early writers refer to them 
 in terms which indicate that they were disposed 
 to accept the existence of a race of giants as 
 a fact, all agree, however, that they were the 
 first inhabitants of the country. These cruel 
 monsters, addicted to the most disgusting vices, 
 the terror of migrating peoples, at last met 
 their fate in a great convulsion of Nature, 
 which shook the earth and caused the moun- 
 tains and volcanoes to swallow up and kill 
 
 ^ Short's " Antiquities ". 
 6 
 
82 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 them (Ixtlilochitl) — evidently the division of the 
 earth mentioned in Genesis x. 
 
 The more one reads, the more we are 
 convinced of the resemblances between the 
 ancient Eastern peoples and the book of 
 Genesis. 
 
 Even the Bible mentions the giants : '' There 
 were giants in those days," says the Bible. A 
 great deal of Central American history is taken 
 up with the doings of an ancient race of giants 
 called Guinames ; these are supposed to have 
 got their name from their strength and prowess 
 in war, and also from their superiority of in- 
 tellect over their fellows. 
 
 The earliest records yet found of the primi- 
 tive inhabitants of America remain principally 
 in the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio and 
 probably may yet be found in quarters yet un- 
 known. These are the remains of the mound 
 builders, the remains of the works of an ex- 
 tinct race ; these burrows and ramparts re- 
 semble those of Europe and Asia and the 
 huge mounds of Mesopotamia. There are also 
 numbers of them to be found in the British 
 Isles, especially in Ireland. Messrs. Squier and 
 Davis, in their Smithsonian contributions, ac- 
 curately describe them. In the light of recent 
 researches it is interesting to read what 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 83 
 
 Latrobe says in his work, " The Eambler in 
 North America " ^ : — 
 
 '' It is impossible to contemplate the mounds 
 which are to be met with throughout this vast 
 region — relics of a people, and of a time of 
 which no recollection or tradition has been 
 preserved — without interest and feeling. That 
 the hands which raised them should long ago 
 have mingled with the clay of which they 
 formed those simple but enduring monuments, 
 excites no wonder. Generation departs after 
 generation, a nation perishes, and its place is 
 filled by another ; but it is seldom that all 
 memory, all tradition, is lost of a whole people. 
 A name alone may remain without any other 
 distinctive feature ; but that is yet a name, 
 and under it the existence of a distinct division 
 of the human race may yet stand recorded in 
 the book of the world's history. But here in 
 this vast continent, dispersed over a great ex- 
 tent of territory, we find the relics of utterly 
 forgotten races. They must have been numer- 
 ous ; for the variety and magnitude of the 
 works they have left behind them attest it. 
 We behold mounds raised upon the rich level 
 plains of the West, which will ever remain a 
 
 1 " Tumuli and other antiquities in the Valley of the 
 Mississippi." 
 
 6* 
 
84 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 marvel. It is in vain we would pry into the 
 secret of their deeds, their time of existence, 
 their history. We dig into their places of 
 sepulture but to throw up surmises. We 
 handle their bones, but they are silent. Eternal 
 darkness has closed upon their memory." 
 
 These mound builders are supposed to have 
 possessed one distinctive feature, the whistling 
 or bird language. By a curious graded scale 
 of shrill whistlings they were able to converse 
 over great distances. It was their need of a 
 means of communication across long distances 
 over the great ravines which caused the de- 
 velopment of a system of crude signalling by 
 whistling into a complete language. The art 
 is still employed in the Atlas Mountains and 
 in Gomera, one of the smallest of the Canaries. 
 
 The language is made up like a sort of Morse 
 code, with high calls and low, short calls and 
 long, with rising and falling inflexions, and 
 with a curiously articulated utterance, some- 
 thing similar to triple-tonguing on a cornet. 
 Quaint and impressive as this whistling lan- 
 guage is, it seems a pity that it should die out. 
 It is, however, surely passing, and a few years 
 more will witness its extinction. 
 
 In the preceding chapter the writer of this 
 little book has given the testimony of the oldest 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 85 
 
 writers and of modern scientific research to 
 the fact of the former existence of an ancient 
 continent occupying the site of the lost Atlantis. 
 Mr. King in his book '' Sumer and Akkad," 
 says : '' There is a peculiar fascination in track- 
 ing any highly-developed civilization to its 
 source". He traces the origin of Greek and 
 Egyptian civilizations through the different 
 stages of T^gean culture, and says that recent 
 excavations have not only yielded remains of 
 the early dynastic kings who lived before the 
 Pyramid builders, but they have also revealed 
 the existence of Egyptians dating from a period 
 long anterior to the earliest written records 
 that have been recovered. He also says : 
 " Archaeologists have been enabled to trace the 
 civilization of Assyria and Babylon back to an 
 earlier and more primitive race, which in the 
 remote past occupied the lower plains of the 
 Tigris and Euphrates, while the more recent 
 digging in Persia and Turkestan has thrown 
 light upon other primitive inhabitants of 
 Western Asia, and has raised problems with 
 regard to their cultural connexions with the 
 West which were undreamed of a few years 
 ago. Probably," he says, ''the first settlement 
 of the Sumerians and Akkadians was made in 
 the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf, as the 
 
86 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 lands of Sumer and Akkad were situated in 
 the lower valley of the Euphrates and Tigris." 
 The early history of Sumer and Akkad is domi- 
 nated by the racial conflict between Semites 
 and Sumerians, it was the racial unrest in 
 Central Asia which gave rise to the Sumerian 
 immigration and to other subsequent migra- 
 tions from the East. Atlantis seems to have 
 been the goal for these uneasy spirits, for we 
 find the Akkadians mentioned as a colony of 
 the favoured land, that for centuries exercised 
 so great a sway over its neighbours as to ex- 
 cite their envy and fear. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 87 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Short, in his " American Antiquities," says : 
 " We are fully aware of the uncertainty which 
 attaches itself to tradition in general, and of 
 the caution with which it should be accepted 
 in treating of the foundations of history ; but 
 still, with reference to the origin and growth 
 of old world nations, nothing better offers it- 
 self in many instances than suspicious legends. 
 
 " The histories of the Egyptians, the Trojans, 
 the Greeks, and of even ancient Rome rests on 
 no surer footing. It is certain that while the 
 legendary history of any nation may be con- 
 fused, exaggerated, and besides full of breaks, 
 still there are some main and fundamental facts 
 out of which it has grown, and this, we think, 
 is especially true of the new world traditions. 
 
 ^* They say that Votan, the grandson of Noah, 
 who was supposed to have been one of those 
 who undertook the building of that lofty edifice 
 which was to reach to heaven, went by express 
 command of the Lord to people the new world 
 
88 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 or that land. They say also that the first people 
 came from the quarter of the north, and when 
 they arrived at Socomusco, they separated, 
 some going to inhabit the country of Nicaragua 
 and others remaining in Chiapas." The tradi- 
 tion of Votan, the founder of the Maya culture, 
 the first civilization in America, though some- 
 what warped, probably by having passed 
 through many hands, is nevertheless one of the 
 most valuable pieces of information which we 
 have concerning the ancient Americans. With- 
 out it our knowledge of the origin of the Mayas 
 would be a hopeless blank, and the ruins of 
 Palenque would be more a mystery than ever. 
 According to this tradition, Votan came from 
 the east, from Valum Chivim, by the way of 
 Valum Votan, from across the sea by Divine 
 command, to apportion the land of the new 
 continent to seven families which he brought 
 with him. From the plain of Shinar, Votan 
 set out for the new world with the seven 
 families who accompanied him. As has 
 already been stated in this little book, it is 
 almost certain that they came over the vast 
 continent Atlantis before the Earth was divided 
 according to the tenth chapter of Genesis. 
 Votan's achievements in the new world were as 
 great as those of any of the heroes of antiquity. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 89 
 
 His great city was named '' Nachan " (City of the 
 Serpents), from his own race, which was named 
 " Chan," a serpent. This Nachan is unques- 
 tionably identified with Palenque. The date 
 of his journey is placed at 1000 years B.C. 
 Pelaez, in his " Memorias para la Historia del 
 Antiquo Regno de Guatemala," states that 
 Votan founded the ancient Nachan or Cul- 
 huacan, now known as Palenque, in the year 
 3000 of the world, and in the tenth century b.c. 
 One of the great works of this hero was the 
 excavation of the first tunnel or snake hole, as 
 it was called in those days, made in the new 
 world from Zuqui to Tzequil. He also knew 
 the value of the so-called weaker sex, for he 
 deposited a great treasure at Huehuetan in 
 Socomusco, which he left under the vigilant 
 care of a guard, commanded by one of the most 
 honourable women of the land. 
 
 The most interesting traditionary history 
 which has been discovered is that of the 
 Guiches of Guatemala. The Guiches, although 
 amalgamated with the Nahua nations from 
 Central Mexico, were a branch of the great 
 Maya monarchy. Signor Pimental, on the 
 authority of an ancient author, states that the 
 name Guiche was applied to the first empire of 
 Palenque and signified many trees, and it is a 
 
90 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 remarkable fact that one of the most fertile 
 valleys in Patagonia at the present day is called 
 the Guichauri by the Pampa Indians, which 
 means in their language, ''Refuge from the 
 winds '\ 
 
 The great Maya family with its numerous 
 branches, each in time developing its own 
 dialect if not its own peculiar language, at an 
 early date fixed itself in the fertile valley of the 
 River Usumasuita and produced a civilization 
 which was old and ripe when the Toltecs came 
 in contact with it. Here in this picturesque 
 valley region in Labasco and Chiapas we may 
 look for the cradle of American civilization. 
 Under the shadow of the magnificent and 
 mysterious ruins of Palenque a people grew to 
 power who spread into Guatemala and Hon- 
 duras, northward to Anabuac and southward 
 into Yucatan. This kingdom of the serpent, 
 as Votan's was called, flourished so rapidly 
 that he founded three tributary monarchies, 
 whose capitals were Talau, Mayapau, and 
 Chiquimala. The former is supposed to have 
 been situated about two leagues east of the 
 town of Ococnigo. Mayapau is well known 
 to have been the capital of Yucatan, and 
 Chiquimala is thought to have been Copau in 
 Honduras. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 91 
 
 Learned ethnologists, including Dr. Le 
 Plongeon, say there is no doubt that the Maya 
 language is one of the most ancient on earth. 
 It was used by a people that lived at least 6000 
 years ago, as proved by the Katuus, to record 
 the history of their rulers, the dogmas of their 
 religion, on the walls of their palaces, on the 
 facades of their temples. The Mexican scholar 
 Melgar is convinced that he sees resemblances 
 between the names employed by the Mayas 
 (Chiapeuca) in their calendar, and the Hebrew 
 philologists also say that the Maya language is 
 not devoid of words from the Assyrian. To 
 the Maya, or rather, the Maya-Guiche stock 
 no doubt belongs the greatest antiquity assign- 
 able to any language or languages on the 
 Continent, all other Indian languages being 
 offshoots from the mother-tongue, and which 
 in its turn, according to undoubted authorities, 
 has sprung from Noah's tongue, the Hebrew. 
 
 The pyramids of Egypt, the ruined cities, 
 the temples, the palaces, and the cisterns of 
 Hindustan (Ceylon), the great wall of China, 
 do not attest a more advanced civilization than 
 the antiquities discovered in many parts of 
 America. Until late years these monuments 
 were neglected even by men of science, and 
 Stephens, who rediscovered the cities of Central 
 
92 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 America, says : '* The hieroglyphic inscriptions 
 of the new world have not yet excited in suffi- 
 cient degree the ardour of savants in decipher- 
 ing the mysterious vestiges of a past civilization. 
 However, in later years American and other 
 savants are occupying themselves with these 
 studies, among whom may be named the 
 learned archaeologist Edward D. Thompson 
 (American), M. Bancroft, M. Hyde Clarke, 
 the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, M. Desire 
 Charney, Count Periquy, the German Profs. 
 Seler, T. Maur, K. Sapper and Prof. Forstman, 
 who is most assiduous in his attempts to de- 
 cipher the Mayan inscriptions. An interesting 
 book has just been published by two Eng- 
 lish travellers, M. M. Channing Arnold and 
 Frederick J. Tabor Frost, who claim for it that 
 it is the first book ever written by Englishmen 
 on Yucatan, ''The Egypt of the New World". 
 They, however, differ as to the age ascribed by 
 learned scientists to the ruined buildings, and 
 seem to think that the art and architecture 
 were introduced by Buddhist emigrants and 
 the Buddhistic designs were modified by native 
 artists, thus unknowingly proving that there 
 must have been a much earlier civilization 
 than could have been brought to America by 
 the sons of Buddha. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 93 
 
 Desir^ Charney says in an article on Central 
 America {" North American Review," January, 
 1881, p. 48): "The ocean of ruins all around 
 are not inferior in size to those of Egypt." At 
 Leotihucan he measured one building two 
 thousand feet wide on each side, and fifteen 
 pyramids each nearly as large as Cheops. 
 *' The city is indeed of vast extent . . . the 
 whole ground, over a space of five or six miles 
 in diameter, is covered with heaps of ruins 
 — ruins which at first make no impression, so 
 complete is their dilapidation." He asserts 
 the great antiquity of these ruins, because he 
 found the very highways of the ancient city to 
 be composed of broken bricks and pottery, the 
 debris left by earlier populations. '' This con- 
 tinent," he says (p. 43), "is the land of 
 mysteries. We here enter an infinity whose 
 limits we cannot estimate. ... I shall soon 
 have to quit work in this place. The long 
 avenue on which I stand is lined with ruins of 
 public buildings and palaces, forming continu- 
 ous lines, as in the streets of modern cities. 
 Still, all these edifices and halls were as nothing 
 compared with the vast substructures which 
 strengthened their foundations. 
 
 " We find the strongest resemblance to the 
 works of the ancient European races, the 
 
94 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 masonry is similar, the cement is the same, 
 the sculptures are alike ; both peoples used the 
 arch ; in both continents we find bricks, glass- 
 ware, and even porcelain ("North American 
 Review," December, 1880, pp. 524, 525) with 
 blue figures on a white ground " ; also bronze 
 composed of the same elements of copper and 
 tin in like proportions ; coins made of copper, 
 round and T-shaped, and even metallic candle- 
 sticks. 
 
 y McCulloch, in his " Researches in America," 
 also believes in the submerged Atlantis, and 
 shows that the American Indians must have 
 been descended from some of the original 
 wanderers from the Plain of Shinar, and while 
 possessing much of the knowledge of the early 
 Eastern nations, they were disconnected from 
 them at a very early period, in proof of which 
 he says : — 
 
 "We find our Indians have very correct 
 traditions of the Flood and confusion of lan- 
 guages ; but after this latter event, the chain 
 which connected them with the old world 
 is broken. Gush, Belus, Nimrod, and others 
 may be found in most of the mythologies of the 
 old world when carefully analysed ; but the 
 American Indians relate nothing of these 
 mysterious mighty personages, a proof of their 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 95 
 
 very early separation from the old world, be- 
 fore the greatness of these men had spread 
 over the different parts of the world." 
 
 That the Mexicans, Peruvians, and other 
 American peoples were highly cultivated their 
 ancient monuments show ; they possessed a 
 very considerable degree of knowledge of both 
 arts and sciences ; which knowledge they have 
 preserved through so many centuries that the 
 sources whence it is derived have long since 
 been forgotten. This knowledge is, however, 
 radically and positively the same with much 
 of the learning of ancient Egypt, Hindustan, 
 and Chaldea. 
 
 Their rites of sun and fire worship closely 
 resemble those of the early Celts of Britain 
 and Ireland, and like the latter they claim 
 to be the '' Children of the Sun ". An ark or 
 argha was one of the universal sacred sym- 
 bols which are found alike in India, Chaldea, 
 Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and amongst the Celtic 
 peoples. ^^ 
 
 As to religious architecture, it is found on 
 both sides of the Atlantic that one of the 
 earliest sacred buildings is the pyramid. 
 
 It seems clear that they were closely con- 
 nected with some religious idea or group of 
 ideas. The identity of designs in the pyramids 
 
96 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 of Egypt and those of Mexico and Central 
 America is too striking to be a mere coinci- 
 dence. True, some — the greater number — of 
 the American pyramids are of the truncated 
 or flattened form, yet, according to Bancroft 
 and others, many of those found in the Yucatan, 
 and notably those near Palenque, are pointed 
 at the top in true Egyptian fashion ; while, on 
 the other hand, we have some of the Egyptian 
 pyramids of the stepped and flattened type. 
 Cholula has been compared to the groups of 
 Dachour, Sakhara, and the Stepped Pyramid of 
 Medourn. Alike in orientation, in structure, 
 and even in their internal galleries and cham- 
 bers, these mysterious monuments of the East 
 and West stand as witnesses to some common 
 source whence the builders drew their plan. 
 
 The excavations lately made by Mr. L. 
 Hewitt Myring in Peru and his collection of 
 prehistoric pottery, found by him in Chimu 
 Cemetery in that country, to which some 
 antiquarian gave a doubtful antiquity of 7000 
 years, and which has so strong a resemblance 
 to the pottery of other Eastern nations, clearly 
 show the immemorial connexion between the 
 Americans and their Eastern brethren. 
 
 The discovery of the pottery proved that 
 there existed in the western slopes of the 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 97 
 
 Andes one of the first civilizations in the world, 
 and corroborated the opinion of many learned 
 authorities that it was brought to Peru by 
 Ophir, also the grandson of Noah, the great 
 old man from whom all antediluvian knowledge 
 descended. There seems no doubt that as 
 Votan, another of the patriarch's grandsons, 
 crossed by Atlantis with his seven families and 
 civilized North and Central America, so Ophir 
 crossed by the sunken continent, Lemuria, to 
 Southern America, carrying with him the same 
 civilization derived from the same source. 
 
 The gold and silver of Peru largely con- 
 tributed to form the metallic currency upon 
 which Europe has carried on her commerce 
 during the last 300 years. 
 
 The Peruvians called gold '' the tears wept 
 by the sun". It was not used among the 
 people for ornament or money. 
 
 The great Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was 
 called '' The Place of Gold ". It was literally 
 a mine of gold — walls, cornices, statuary, plate, 
 ornaments : all were of gold ; the very ewers, 
 pipes, and aqueducts, even the agricultural 
 implements used in the garden of the temple, 
 were of gold and silver. The value of the 
 jewels which adorned the temple was equal to 
 180,000,000 dollars ! The riches of the king- 
 
 7 
 
98 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 dom can be conceived when we remember 
 that from a pyramid in Chimu a Spanish ex- 
 plorer named Toledo took, in the year 1577, 
 4,450,284 dollars in gold and silver (" New 
 American Cyclopaedia " : art. ^' American An- 
 tiquities "). 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 99 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ^As already stated, the story of the sub- 
 merged tract of land, formerly considered a 
 myth, has been steadily gaining ground with 
 serious scientists within the last fe\v years, and 
 the French work, " Histoires des Hommes," 
 gives the honour of all the great discoveries 
 and inventions of the time to the race called 
 Atlantians, the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis, 
 survivors from the catastrophe first bringing 
 their civihzation to America.^;, 
 
 Whitehurst says so much in his learned 
 works to strengthen this hypothesis of this 
 catastrophe that the author gives the extract 
 in his own words. He was treating of the 
 Giant's Causeway in Ireland, which he asserts 
 is of volcanic origin. " Whoever attentively 
 views and considers these romantic cliffs, to- 
 gether with their exterior appearance, will, I 
 presume, soon discover sufficient cause to con- 
 clude that the crater whence that melted matter 
 flowed, together with an immense tract of land 
 
 7* 
 
100 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 toward the north, has been absolutely sunk and 
 swallowed up into the earth, at some remote 
 period of time, and became the bottom of the 
 Atlantic Ocean." He also makes an observa- 
 tion that he was almost persuaded Ireland was 
 originally a part of the island Atlantis. 
 
 In 1590 Edmund Spenser crossed the Irish 
 Channel, bringing with him the first three 
 books of his " Faerie Queene,*' in the introduc- 
 tion to the second of which he thus defends 
 the verisimilitude of that land of fancy in which 
 the scenes of his ** famous antique history " are 
 laid : — 
 
 Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru ? 
 
 Or who in venturous vessel measured 
 The Amazon, huge river, nov7 found true ? 
 
 Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view ? 
 Yet all these were, where no man did them know, 
 
 Yet have from wisest ages hidden been. 
 And later times things more unknowne shall show, 
 
 Why then should witless man so much misweeu 
 That nothing is but that which he hath seen ? 
 
 What if within the moon's fair shining sphere : 
 
 What if in every other star unseen 
 Of other worlds he happily should hear ? 
 
 He wonder would much more ; yet such to some appear. 
 
 That Ireland had connexion with the early 
 emigrants from the Plain of Shinar is proved 
 by the most undoubted authorities. Even 
 
VANISHED ClVlLlZAtidNS^ 101 
 
 Camden (who was no friend of the Irish) says : 
 ''Ireland is justly called Ogygia (that is ac- 
 cording to Plutarch), for the Irish date their 
 history from the first eras of the world, so that 
 in comparison with them the antiquity of all 
 other countries is modern, and almost in its 
 infancy ". Those that deny Ireland to have 
 been Plutarch's Ogygia, assign this reason only, 
 that the distance of Ogygia from Britain does 
 not agree with Ireland, but Camden supposes 
 that ''Plutarch was more inaccurate in de- 
 scribing the distance than in the name of the 
 island, whose situation to the west of Britain 
 undoubtedly proves it to be Ireland and to 
 which the name is applied with the greatest 
 propriety. Slater, the English poet, makes 
 use of Ogygia for Ireland in his "Pate 
 Albion," when deducing the origin of James 
 King of England from thence. Aeria and 
 Ogygia were given in common to Egypt and 
 Ireland, as also that other most ancient and 
 universally allowed tradition of our historians 
 of the marriage of Scota the daughter of 
 Pharaoh with a predecessor of the Scots, which 
 is evidence that there had been an ancient 
 commerce and an alliance of very ancient date, 
 carried on and mutually maintained, between 
 the Egyptians and our ancestors the Irish, and 
 
102 feMrNNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 which if they had not subsisted when Pharaoh 
 was immersed in the Red Sea, or when Moses 
 flourished, at least might have been commenced 
 with some other of the succeeding Pharaohs. 
 
 The first colonization of Ireland after the 
 Deluge, according to ancient records quoted 
 by O'Flaherty and Keating, was made by Ninus 
 (the son and successor of Belus) the supposed 
 founder of the Assyrian Empire and the hus- 
 band of the famous Queen Semiramis. He 
 sent a warrior to '' spy out Ireland " ; a fact 
 which proved that the ancients must have had 
 an early knowledge of that country. The 
 pagan Irish worshipped the sun under the 
 name of Bell or Belus. Hence comes Beltain, 
 interpreted Teinn Bheil or Bels Fire, the Irish 
 name of the month of May. Belus was also 
 worshipped as a god by the Phoenicians, 
 Babylonians, Greeks, etc. Apollo, however, 
 was the principal god of the pagan Irish, hence 
 the harp in the armorial bearings of Ireland. 
 
 From the Psalter of Cashel the following 
 verses are taken : — 
 
 Adna son of Bith the Wise, 
 
 A warrior sent by Nin MacPheil (Ninus 
 the Assyrian Emperor) 
 First came our Eri to explore 
 
 And pull the grass of Fidh-Inis. 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATKJNS 103 
 
 Some of this grass he bore away 
 
 And homeward went to tell his tale, 
 
 This was the conquest full complete 
 Of shortest spell that Eri knew. 
 
 The custom of pulling a tuft of grass, or 
 carrying away a portion of the soil, is still one 
 of the customs observed in taking possession 
 of lands in Ireland. 
 
 The old Irish manuscript, "The Book of 
 Lecan," says that after the return of Adna 
 from spying out Ireland, Ninus the Emperor 
 sent Parthelon with a large expedition to take 
 possession of the island. He set out from 
 Migdonia, a territory of ancient Macedonia, 
 and according to the same manuscript knew 
 many arts. 
 
 And the construction of the Finian vessels. 
 The iron vessels of occidental blackness. 
 
 ''Ireland was supposed to have remained 
 desert for 300 years after the Flood, but when 
 Parthelon arrived with his expedition he found 
 Ireland already occupied by an earlier people 
 supposed to have been of Finnish type, traces 
 of which have been found — they it was that 
 probably left those stone implements im- 
 properly called Celts ; they lived by fishing 
 and fowling, and they had dwelt for over 200 
 
104 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 years before the coming of Parthelon, upon 
 whose arrival these previous possessors gave 
 him battle on the plain of Magh Ita in County 
 Donegal and were defeated." 
 
 Parthelon 's arrival in Ireland was in the two- 
 and-twentieth year before the birth of Abra- 
 ham, that is in the year of the world 1978. 
 
 Many of the nations of Northern Asia are 
 sprung from Japhet, say learned historians, and 
 from him are descended most of the inhabitants 
 of Europe. Parthelon was a Scythian of the 
 race of Magog the son of Jaj)het, and was one 
 of the early colonizers sent forth from the East 
 in the heroic ages, who first disseminated letters 
 and commerce and agriculture throughout 
 southern Europe, and for these Ireland owes 
 its knowledge to Parthelon and his followers 
 previous to the arrival of the sons of Miledh. 
 
 Historians say that the Keltic country 
 (Keltke) from the depth of the district and its 
 extent stretches from the outer sea and the 
 Arctic regions, and reaches to the Pontic Scythia, 
 and that this people emigrating thence, not 
 at one single movement nor in a continuous 
 stream, but always pushing forwards every 
 year at the proper season, overran the Conti- 
 nent in hostile fashion at many different times ; 
 wherefore though they had in turn many ap- 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 105 
 
 pellations, the army was called by a common 
 name Kelto-Skuthai. 
 
 Plutarch maintains that the Kimmerio pene- 
 trated slowly from the Pontic Scythia, that is 
 from the neighbourhood of the Euxine, to the 
 Western Ocean, each tribe and family driving 
 out their neighbours and seizing their lands as 
 opportunity presented itself. 
 
 With the invasion of the Romans into Britain, 
 she lost many of her historical traditions and 
 sources of history of the Celts, and it is owing 
 to that nation never having gained a footing 
 in Ireland that so many of Ireland's ancient 
 manuscripts have been preserved. They are 
 veritable mines of historical lore for British 
 students of the first colonizations of our islands 
 before divisions occurred amongst us. Scotland 
 must have been separated by a very narrow 
 channel ; we read in the '' Scots Magazine " for 
 1807 of the Scots paying a curious tribute to 
 the Irish as follows : — 
 
 " Loch Ur was originally a navigable arm 
 of Solway Firth, but, in a great sea storm, 
 a moss was driven over from Ireland, which 
 choked it up and formed the present moss. 
 The inhabitants of that part of the country 
 for a long time paid a yearly tribute to the 
 Irish for it, but in process of time their de- 
 
106 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 scendants becoming more shrewd and self-in- 
 terested, sent the Irish word to come and take 
 this moss home again, for they would pay 
 tribute no longer for it ; and the Irish, find- 
 ing this alternative impracticable, dropt the 
 matter." 
 
 A map made by Sir Henry de la Beche nearly 
 a hundred years ago shows the wonderful 
 changes made by the encroaching of the sea, 
 and the old coast-lines which the mariner finds 
 beneath its waves (far in advance of the present 
 shores), are now being understood in all their 
 wonderful significance. 
 
 R. A. Smith Godwin Austin, F.R.S., has 
 identified the trees which comprise the old 
 sunk forests at present existing under the 
 channels which separate England from Ireland, 
 as belonging to those which could not live along 
 the seaboard, and says they belong to an old 
 and extensive land which is now submerged 
 beneath the sea. 
 
 This takes us back to the time when the 
 European mainland, instead of terminating, as 
 it does to-day, with the coasts of Norway and 
 France, stretched far westward in one unbroken 
 area far beyond the present coast of Ireland ; 
 a fact which further strengthens the opinions 
 of so many distinguished authorities that 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 107 
 
 Ireland once formed part of the lost Atlan- 
 tis, the Utopia of that great Englishman Sir 
 Thomas More/ 
 
 ''There is convincing proof," says Sir K. 
 Sibbald, "that the Scots or Northern Irish 
 were the people from whom all expeditions 
 passed into Britain, and the Horesti, that is 
 the Highlanders, were called Hybernici as 
 being a colony from Ireland." Prof Kuno 
 Meyer, in his learned lectures at the Alexandra 
 College, Dublin, last season promulgated the 
 same theory, although some antiquarians, in- 
 cluding the Welsh Prof. Khys, advocate the 
 contrary opinion, namely, that the early migra- 
 tions came from Britain into Ireland ; but for 
 these theories they have no foundation. 
 
 It was a received opinion in the time of Pro- 
 pertius, who lived under Augustus Csesar, that 
 the Irish were descended from the Scythians 
 (lib. 4, El. 3). Whence it appears that the 
 Irish were descended from the Getae (Goths), 
 a branch of the Scythians, the common origin 
 of all the Celtic tribes who inhabited Europe. 
 
 No countries in Europe can furnish better 
 materials for the knowledge attainable from 
 ancient languages, than our own isles of Britain 
 and Ireland. 
 
 ^ Blessed Thomas More. 
 
108 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 All Irish historians assert that their ancestors 
 received the use of letters directly from the 
 Phoenicians, and all concur in affirming that 
 several colonies from Africa settled in Ireland, 
 and General Valiancy and other learned philo- 
 logists have compared and asserted the affinity 
 of the Bearli Feni of the Irish with the Punic 
 or language of the Carthagenians. 
 
 Diodorus Siculus says, and this opinion is 
 confirmed by the philologist Angelus Rocca, 
 that the Phoenicians received their letters from 
 the Syrians, and that the primitive Phoenician 
 letters were the same as the ancient Samaritan. 
 Irish may therefore, say learned philologists, 
 be deemed a Punic-Celtic compound. They 
 also say : *^ The Punic tongue, without doubt, 
 was the Canaanitish or old Hebrew language, 
 and that Carthage and other cities of Africa 
 were colonies of the Phoenicians. 
 
 " Irish is the most copious language extant ; 
 as from the Hebrew proceeded the Phoenician, 
 Carthagenian or Punic, Aeolian, Dorian, and 
 Etruscan, and from those was formed the Latin ; 
 Irish is therefore a language of the utmost 
 importance, and it would be a reproach to all 
 Irish men and women, that so valuable a part 
 of ancient learning should be lost." 
 
 Irish was not neglected in Ireland till the 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 109 
 
 reign of Charles II. The last school for the 
 study of it was kept in the County Tipperary 
 under the professorship of Bcethius MacEgan 
 in the reign of Charles I, and it was in that 
 seminary that the celebrated Duald MacFurbis 
 got his knowledge of it and closed the line of 
 Phenian learning until the Renaissance within 
 the last few years, thanks to the devoted 
 members of the Gaelic League under its dis- 
 tinguished founder Dr. Douglas Hyde. 
 
 Prof. Rask, the great Danish philologist, 
 in his book ''Samlede Afhandlinger," shows 
 the wonderful similarity between the Hyberno- 
 Celtic and American-Indian dialects, thus 
 strengthening the assumption of many learned 
 men as to the truth of the story of the sub- 
 merged continent which once united America 
 to Europe and of which Ireland is generally 
 supposed to have been a part. 
 
no BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 "It has long been suspected," says King in 
 '* Sumar and Akkad," " that a marked change 
 in natural conditions must have taken place 
 during historic times throughout considerable 
 areas of the world/' 
 
 The excavations made in recent times in 
 Crete, which changed the so-called Minoan 
 myths into historical fact and revealed the 
 existence of a great island empire that existed 
 in the ^gean long before Greek civilization 
 began, serves to prove the truth of what was 
 called by many writers, including the distin- 
 guished American historian, Justin Winsor, 
 "Plato's fable of the Lost Continent of 
 Atlantis ". 
 
 There have been few discoveries of greater 
 interest and importance than those which have 
 recently been made, and are still being made, 
 by Prof. Garstang at Merve in the Soudan. 
 Prof. Sayce in 1909 located the site of the 
 city of Merve on the east bank of the Nile, 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 111 
 
 between the fifth and sixth cataracts, and the 
 excavations carried on by Prof. Garstang at 
 the end of 1909 enabled the details of the 
 Ethiopian capital to become known. The 
 Temple of Ammon, where the Ethiopian kings 
 were crowned, was also discovered. Even 
 more interesting is the excavation of the 
 beautiful Sun Temple which was discovered 
 at the edge of the Khor, or meadow, thus 
 confirming the account of Herodotus, who tells 
 us that Cambyses sent to the Ethiopian king 
 to inquire about " The Table of the Sun ". 
 
 In his books, " New Light on Ancient Egypt," 
 and "Egypt; Ancient Sights and Scenes," 
 Maspero has the following (speaking on the 
 excavations made in that country) : '' It is to be 
 noted that most of the names mentioned in 
 the Old Testament or by classical geographers 
 are mentioned in the newly found inscriptions. 
 Tyre, Sidon, Berytis, Accho, Damascus, Gaza, 
 even Jerusalem, etc." 
 
 And again he says in the former (p. 12) : — 
 " The most ancient explorers of Africa have 
 recently risen from their graves. They are 
 Egyptians, who belong to one of the most 
 powerful families of the country, to that of the 
 lords of Assouan and Elephantine. They lived 
 somewhere about 3500 years b.c. ; two or 
 
112 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 three centuries are of no consequence in deal- 
 ing with dates in the history of ancient Eastern 
 empires." 
 
 Justin Winsor although differing from the 
 author as to the truth of the story, says that 
 the best book on the subject of Atlantis is 
 that by Ignatius Donnelly, " Atlantis or the 
 Antediluvian World ". Winsor (in his '' Criti- 
 cal History of America"), with many other 
 learned writers, totally denied that there ever 
 existed a continent which joined America with 
 the other continents of the world ; but even in 
 very early times the truth of Plato's story as 
 related by Solon had its advocates, and is 
 every year receiving stronger and stronger 
 confirmation, not only by the discoveries of 
 learned antiquarians but also by the accounts 
 published of the voyages of the " Dolphin " and 
 "Challenger," of the discovered ridges under 
 the Atlantic, which show unmistakably that 
 they formerly connected the so-called old and 
 new world. 
 
 Following the example of the great Hindu 
 scholar M. Halhed, who, in the eighteenth 
 century, so honestly confessed his mistake as 
 to the wonderful antiquity of Hindu civiliza- 
 tion, Mr. King in his learned book ''Sumer 
 and Akkad," says : — 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 113 
 
 ''The general effect of recent research has 
 been to reduce the very early dates which 
 were formerly in vogue. It must be admitted 
 that all dates anterior to the foundation of the 
 Babylonian monarchy are necessarily approxi- 
 mate, and while we are without definite points 
 of contact between the earlier and later chron- 
 ology of Babylonia, it is advisable, as far as 
 possible, to think in periods." 
 
 What a pity learned men were not more 
 cautious in former times. How much infidel- 
 ity might have been prevented. 
 
 The American writer John C. Heaviside, in 
 his book ''Antiquities of the New World," 
 thinks that civilization came first from the 
 West to the East ; that it was simultaneous, 
 there is no doubt, as has already been shown. 
 Noah's family all had the same ideas and 
 civilization, and when his sons were dispersed 
 they carried these ideas with them, civilization 
 being modified in each different country ac- 
 cording to circumstances. Ophir and his fol- 
 lowing probably made their way to Peru by 
 the lost continent Lemuria ; Australia and the 
 Pacific Islands are generally thought to have 
 been the tops of the mountains belonging to 
 the submerged continent Lemuria. It is cer- 
 tain, as Prof. Dana has shown in his study of 
 
114 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 the atolls and barriers of the Pacific, that if 
 not a continent at least an archipelago measur- 
 ing 6000 miles in length by from 1000 to 2000 
 miles in breadth, has subsided to a depth 
 ranging from 3000 to 6000 feet. Prof. Le 
 Coute estimates the loss of land to equal 
 20,000,000 square miles, and defines its bound- 
 aries by the Hawaiian and Fiji groups north 
 and south, and the Paumotu group and Pelews 
 east and west. Prof. Dana is of the opinion 
 that this vast area has subsided since the Ter- 
 tiary age. To show that a high civilization 
 once prevailed throughout Polynesia, we need 
 only cite the remains found on Easter Island 
 by Captain Cook, two of which statues are 
 now in the British Museum, one presented 
 to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by Captain 
 Barclay of Her Majesty's ship " Topaz ". Mr. 
 Baldwin, in the Appendix of his work, refers 
 also to ruins of a high order existing on Ascen- 
 sion, Marshall, Gilbert, Kingsmill, Sachones, 
 Swallow, Strong's, Navigators', and Hawaiian 
 Islands. 
 
 A quadrangular tower forty feet high, and 
 several stone-lined canals, are to be seen at 
 the harbour at Strong's Island. On the ad- 
 joining Isle of Sele, cyclopean walls forming 
 large enclosures are overgrown by forests, 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 115 
 
 '' These walls are twelve feet thick, and within 
 are vaults, artificial caverns, and secret pass- 
 ages." Not more than 500 people now inhabit 
 these islands, their tradition is that an ancient 
 city formerly stood round this harbour, mostly 
 on Sele, occupied by a powerful people whom 
 they called '' Anut," and who had large vessels 
 in which they made long voyages east and 
 west, many moons being required for these 
 voyages. 
 
 A recent number of the ''London Maga- 
 zine" contains a most interesting article on 
 the Mammoth Statues found a few years since 
 on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean. The 
 island is but twenty-nine miles in circumfer- 
 ence, and contains a number of craters of vast 
 dimensions. The writer of the article says all 
 who have visited the place have expressed un- 
 bounded amazement at the vast and mysteri- 
 ous pre-historic remains which abound. The 
 island contains no less than 550 statues similar 
 in design to those presented to the British 
 Museum ; one and all were exactly like in 
 features. In size they range from a Colossus 
 seventy feet in height to a pigmy standing 
 three feet. The statues invariably consist of 
 a head and bust almost to the hips ; they are 
 carved from verv hard stone found on the 
 
 8* 
 
116 BEGINNINGS OE GLIMPSES OF 
 
 island. The statues were not placed simply 
 on the soil. They rested on large platforms 
 and were really tombs ; some of the stones 
 used in the building frequently weigh 500 
 tons each. 
 
 Human remains have generally been found 
 in the chambers. Captain Barclay, RN., who 
 brought back the statues to the British 
 Museum, says in a paper read to the South 
 Australian branch of the Koyal Geographical 
 Society, April, 1898, " The whole island is one 
 vast sepulchre ; look where you may, dig where 
 you like, human remains are sure to be found ". 
 In other words Easter Island was a sacred 
 spot, the burial ground of some long past 
 pre-historic race of people who used the same 
 triangle on its tombs on Easter Island as those 
 mysterious far-distant peoples of pyramids, 
 triangles, and sun worship. 
 
 The writer of the article says, apropos of the 
 immense weight of the stone : '' Since these 
 blocks weigh anything up to 250 tons, it be- 
 comes a puzzle indeed to form any idea how 
 they were moved. Even to-day a big engineer- 
 ing firm would find great difficulty in lifting 
 and placing a monolith weighing 30 tons — let 
 alone 250 ! What implements had their makers 
 for moving them and placing them in situf 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 117 
 
 The statue-workers were interrupted in their 
 work by some awful calamity — no doubt an 
 earthquake. These statues were found in all 
 stages of completion, some being attached to 
 the native rock in the quarry, surrounded by 
 the chips of the workmen, others lying where 
 they were left on the way to the platforms they 
 were intended to adorn." Who were these 
 people who made the statues ? 
 
 Turn to Genesis and read about the race of 
 wicked giants for whose punishment the Flood 
 was brought about. They are the people. In 
 short, these works are probably one of the few 
 survivals of the inhabited world prior to the 
 time of Noah. Concluding his most interesting 
 article, '' Alpha " writes : — 
 
 " Whether the giants were particularly sinful 
 or not we cannot know. Judging from the 
 austere expression on the faces of their statues 
 on Easter Island, probably they have been 
 libelled." 
 
 But what is interesting is that the book of 
 Genesis should coincide so completely with the 
 American legends, not only as to the giants 
 and their destruction, but as to their very 
 ' failings. And it is additionally interesting be- 
 cause this cataclysm — the Flood of the Bible- 
 is doubtless also the same terrible catastrophe, 
 
118 BEGINNINGS OR GLIMPSES OF 
 
 noted in all American annals, when volcanoes 
 sprang into being and the whole surface of the 
 earth was altered. 
 
 The American continent was rent in twain. 
 Volcanoes, earthquakes, and floods extermi- 
 nated most of her inhabitants, and threw the 
 few survivors back from the high state of civi- 
 lization they then enjoyed. It was then that 
 the once great continent Atlantis, from which 
 radiated the first civilization of the world, 
 finally sank beneath the waves of the ocean in 
 a day and a night. 
 
 " You may look to Atlantis as the mother- 
 country whose colonists and missionaries trav- 
 elled far and wide, the ancestors of Egypt and 
 Peru, Easter Island and Mexico. And you 
 may also assume that Easter Island, far in the 
 west, was not only one of the most hallowed 
 places for the rest of the bones of a long- 
 forgotten people, but that in its isolated posi- 
 tion, far out of reach of the ravages of man, 
 those statues have stood from the most remote 
 period, a testimony to the truth of the Scrip- 
 tures of the time when the world was inhabited 
 by giants." 
 
 The vast sunken continent of Lemuria prob- 
 ably owes its name to the great festival 
 which the Romans held on 9 May annually 
 
VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS 119 
 
 in honour of the dead — Lemures, or, which 
 seems more likely, the Lemures were the in- 
 habitants of the lost Lemuria. Some day or 
 other much more may be discovered as to who 
 and what these people were. Nothing once 
 cast into the wide abyss of time is ever lost. 
 It not infrequently happens that the remains 
 of ancient civilizations lie for a long lapse of 
 ages unhonoured and neglected until they find 
 favour in the eyes of some distinguished anti- 
 quarian, who digs and collects the scattered 
 dry bones of antiquity, and breathes into them 
 the breath of life, sometimes quoting authority 
 only to deny it. However, history issues no 
 sentence that history may not repeal. Time 
 fights the battle of truth, an unimpassioned 
 but unwearied ally. 
 
 The author concludes this little book by a 
 sentence from the '* Shastah," one of the four 
 great Indian books, which contains a most im- 
 portant truth, namely, that it is insanity in 
 man to sound the depths of the Divine Essence. 
 
 ABERDEEN : THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 '22'3iuL 
 
 ^'iSCA.. 
 
 %n 
 
 ,, iqCK 03 
 
 \ t)ec 
 
 59&C 
 
 REC'D LCi 
 
 DECl igg 
 
 FEB 5 1953 
 
 l^f^SK.) l20ct'61T0 
 ^ „ REC'D LD 
 
 ' 2914ov'53Wb SEP 8 8 iggt 
 
 /->i' 
 
 i|^BV2 91953 »J»^ 3, 
 
 29May'5LPL FEB 28 ^^"^ 
 
 
 Old 
 
 ;54Apr'62SSC 
 
 =■0*0 LO 
 
 S IG '3G3 
 
 ^AR 1 '68 -10 AM 
 
 rv ip'^n 
 
 21-100m-9,'48 (B399sl6)476