Part 3

The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls was the ruling passion among the Astecs. Whether this was the fruition of all polytheistic religions, or the retention of primordial culture, I know not; but we know the Egyptians embalmed their dead, lest the dissolution of the body would destroy also the soul, and the greatest desecration that could befall the ancient Greeks and Romans was the refusal of burial, because the soul of him thus uncared for wandered thenceforth as a disembodied ghost. We read in Homer’s “Iliad” how the dead Patroclus comes to the sleeping Achilles, who tries in vain to grasp him with loving arms, but the soul, like smoke, flits away below the earth. How Hermotimos, the seer, used to go out of his body, till at last, his soul, coming back from a spirit journey, found that his wife had burnt his body on a funeral pile, and that he had become a bodyless ghost. How Odysseus visits the bloodless ghosts in Hades, and the shadows of the dead in Purgatory wondered to see the body of Dante there, which stopped the sunlight and cast a shadow.

This idea of the phantom life of souls as shades and shadows constitutes the higher philosophy of the transcendental metaphysics of the ancient Greeks, whose exponent was Pythagoras.

Forbearing to enter here upon the religious status of the Astecs, we turn again to their language. If we are to believe the highest authority on these subjects, we are ready to prove that the Atlas Mountains and Atlantic Ocean, while known to the Greeks a thousand years before Christ, still belong to the Nahuatl language in North America.

The words _Atlas_ and _Atlantic_ have no satisfactory etymology in any language in Europe or Asia, and we are certain no such roots are found in the Greek; but in the Nahuatl language we find their homes.

The consonants most used are _l_, _t_, _x_, _z_; next the sounds _tl_ and _tz_; but _l_, the most frequent used, is never found at the beginning of a word.

The radicals _a_, _atl_, which signify water, _atlan_, on the border or amid the water, give us the adjective _Atlantic_, pertaining to the land, _Aztlan_ (or _Atlantis_), in the midst of the water. We have also _atlaca_, to hurl or dart from the water, whose preterite makes _atlaz_. In the time of Columbus a city named _Atlan_ existed on the Gulf of Darien, with a good harbor, but now it is only a small pueblo named _Acla_.

Undoubtedly we have reached the fountain-head. The nearest point of land from the Island of “Atlantis” was the Atlas Mountains, which at that distance would seem to be _darted up from the water_; from their _Atlantis_, _in the midst of the water_. One has but to look on the map of Mexico to-day, and see that my theory is supported by such words as Tlascoran, Tlascala, Tlatlanquitepec, Tlascopan, Tenochtitlan, Chialinitzla, Yxtacamaxtitlan, Popocatapetl, etc., and scores of others, which prove that those combinations of liquids and consonants are at home _only_ in the Nahuatl countries; _ergo_, the Atlas Mountains and Atlantic Ocean and “Atlantis” were named by these people before their continent was destroyed.

VI. The First Men of America. ──────

“Antiquity appears to have begun Long after their primeval race was run.”

Time is the only alembic to test the true character of great men or deeds. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Hugo are the few select representatives whom the world acknowledges as its spokesmen. Shakespeare was in his grave a hundred years before he spoke authoritatively to the world, and with Dante it was no better. Ages had passed away before the seven cities of Greece warred for the honor of Homer’s birthplace, but for twenty-six centuries has the “Siege of Troy” stood out in profile as the model epic of the world, but of doubtful veracity because of its antiquity; but Dr. Schliemann’s excavations seem destined yet to find the funeral pyre of Patroclus, surrounded by the remains of Trojan captives.

Even within the last twelve months has the French archæologist, M. Marcel Dieulafay, brought to light the ancient city of Susa, and we may now behold the palace of Artaxerxes Mnemon, whose foundation was laid by Xerxes I. 485 B.C.; and now, after twenty-three centuries, the Bible student may take his Bible in his hand and turn to the Book of Esther and read, while the guide in the ancient capital of Persia points to this spot where Mordecai sat, to that spot where Haman was hanged, to this Court where the lovely Esther was crowned queen, and whence the sorrowing Vashti departed, as the unfortunate Hebe, cupbearer of Jove, before the victorious Ganymede.

Plato recorded the sad fate of Atlantis nearly five hundred years before Christ, and Solon had recorded the same in a poem two hundred years before. Plato says the expedition against Egypt took place during the reigns of the Athenian kings, Cecrops and Erechtheus, and according to the “Marble of Paros,” those kings ruled in 1582 B.C. and 1409 B.C., which is not a great deal more ancient than the siege of Troy.

Though this is ancient history, we have as much right to accept Plato’s history as Homer’s, if it can be established.

The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg claims that Mexican chronology dates back two thousand eight hundred and fourteen years. Because America was latest discovered, it is the popular opinion that it should have been the latest developed, but there is evidence sufficient that the New World is in every sense the oldest.

We know that this continent was once covered with glaciers as low down as New Jersey and the Ohio River. According to Dr. Croll, glaciation is brought about by the combined effect of the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit and the precession of the equinoxes, which makes the distance of our planet from the sun vary considerably during the year. We are three million miles nearer the sun in winter than in summer, while the reverse is the case in the Southern Hemisphere. If our winter now were long as our summer, and we were to continue three million miles nearer the sun in the winter, a decided change would occur, and our winters would grow longer and colder, and our summers shorter and hotter. Now the precession of the equinoxes and the motion of aphelion actually bring this about every ten thousand five hundred years, and the condition of the two hemispheres is reversed as regards their glaciation, and this reversion has been going on during all geologic time.

But the eccentricity itself of the earth in its orbit between perihelion and aphelion varies, and since the eccentricity is now at its minimum, three million miles, we infer that our last glacial epoch occurred ten thousand five hundred years ago, and the ice mantle has retreated from 39° in New Jersey to 61° in Southern Greenland, which is now covered by a glacier twelve hundred miles long, four hundred miles wide, and a mile thick, while the ice in the Southern Hemisphere has increased to several miles in thickness, and to such extent, that the nearest point to the South Pole Sir Ross was able to reach, was still fourteen hundred miles from the Pole.

While the St. Lawrence and the area of the Great Lakes were under these glaciers, of course there could have been no outlet to the Atlantic of the waters, which were forced by the Alleghenies to flow to the Gulf, at the time of the great thaw ten thousand years ago, and the St. Lawrence could only have been formed after the ice had retreated beyond the Great Lake areas. Since that period the Niagara has been cutting its way from Lake Ontario through the solid limestone of the Upper Silurian Period, until the Falls of Niagara are now seven miles from the lake. Dana estimates that the river has cut its way at the rate of a foot a year, which would make it thirty-five thousand years cutting its channel. Sir Charles Lyell, as quoted in Hugh Miller’s “Testimony of the Rocks,” estimates the rate at fifty yards in forty years, which would make it ten thousand years, which agrees exactly with the time the glacier crossed the Great Lakes. However long it was, man was here then, for a tooth of a man has been found with that of a mammoth in the Drift of the Niagara, and Dr. Abbott has found bones of the mastodon and the wisdom tooth of a man, fourteen feet under the gravel of the Delaware, and their rolled and abraded surfaces prove them either pre-glacial or contemporaneous with glaciers.

While the great glaciers were breaking up at the head-waters of the Platte, Yellowstone and Missouri, the flooded rivers dropped their sediment in the vast inundated lakes, whose rich bottoms formed the loess which so well characterizes the fertile prairie soil of the Western States to-day.

In Nebraska, stone arrow-heads and the bones of the ancient elephant were found thirty feet under the loess, and in Greene County, Illinois, a well was dug seventy-two feet through the loess, when a stone hatchet was found, proving that the hatchet was dropped there when Illinois was covered by a lake over which the rude hunter paddled his canoe.

Dr. Koch, of St. Louis, found the bones of the mastodon in the Osage Valley in Missouri, which was killed while mired down, by fire being built around it, which consumed nearly all the bones of the animal except the legs and toes. The presence of ashes and stones proves conclusively that the huge animal met his death at the hands of man.

One other instance to prove that man existed on this continent in the Pliocene Epoch: Dr. Winslow sent to the Natural History Society, of Boston, a skull of a human being found in a shaft in California one hundred and eighty feet deep, and under five successive layers of volcanic lava and tufa and four layers of auriferous gravel. To quote from Foster’s “Prehistoric Times”: “Since the introduction, then, of man on this continent, the physical features as well as the climate have undergone great changes. The volcanic peaks of the Sierra Nevadas have been lifted up, the glaciers have disappeared, the great cañons themselves have been excavated in the solid rock, and what then were the beds of streams, now form the Table Mountains.” Admitting this skull to be Pliocene, we have a human bone in America older than the oldest human relics found on the continent of Europe. When we consider that this skull was _in situ_ before the mainland of the Sierras was uplifted by volcanic upheavals, accompanied by flaming rivers of molten lava, followed by the glacial night of cold, ice and snow, we no longer believe that the first inhabitants of North America crossed Behring’s Strait from Asia.

We have argued that the Mound-builders both entered and left the Mississippi Valley by the south, and that the Red Indian entered by Florida from the Antilles, as implements found in Jamaica correspond with those found in Venezuela, and DeSoto found a higher civilization among the Natchez tribes of the South than was found among any others.

According to the Icelandic sagas, Lief and Bjorn reached Labrador about the year 1000 A.D. and found a dwarfish race of men “of short stature,” whom they called skraelings. We know well such terms could not apply to the stately Algonquin warriors the Europeans found in New England. No; these were Esquimaux, whom the warlike Indians had compelled to follow the retreat of the glaciers toward the Land of the Midnight Sun. They crossed to the Great Lakes and compelled the peaceful Mound-builders to go southward. They crossed the Rocky Mountains and drove the inhabitants of the Sierras also. They crowded them into the gorges and cañons of Colorado, Utah and Arizona. The frightened refugees were driven to the necessity of building dwellings in the overhanging cliffs of rivers, and these nests of human swallows are now known as the “Cliff-dwellers” of the Colorado and Hili.

They were not allowed to stay here. Driven by their relentless hunters, they moved onward to the plateaus of Arizona and cactus plains of New Mexico, where, huddled up between the tribes of Mexico on the south, and the hunting Indians behind them, they built the pueblos and “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” The archæological remains prove to us to-day that New Mexico was as thickly settled by these miserable fugitives as Pennsylvania or Delaware. The mournful spectacle to-day of the adobe pueblos along the Pecos and Rio Grande, is the closing chapter of a history written in blood, and sealed by the life of a nation, with characters forever enigmatical to the civilized world.

VII. Conclusion. ──────

“And thy request think now fulfilled, that asked How first this world and face of things began, And what before thy memory was done From the beginning.”

The former existence of Atlantis is an hypothesis, it is true, but so is the existence of Lemuria, and nearly every scientist of Europe believes that a continent once existed in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and India, and the proof is not wanting.

On the Island of Madagascar are found thirty-three species of monkeys, called Lemurs, which are not found in Africa, nor in any other part of the globe, except Ceylon, India, and the Malay Archipelago. Because the Lemurs are found only in this region, Sclater, the English zoölogist, has called the sunken continent “Lemuria.”

Between Madagascar and India are a number of submerged banks of less than one thousand fathoms deep, which a slight elevation would make comparative easy stages of communication between Madagascar and India for all animals. An elevation of three hundred feet would unite Java, Sumatra and Borneo into one great peninsula of the Asiatic continent.

The Island of Madagascar is two hundred and fifty miles wide and one thousand miles long, and is separated from Africa by the Mozambique Channel, only two hundred and fifty miles wide. Africa has monkeys, apes, and baboons; also lions, leopards, hyenas, zebras, rhinocerii, elephants, buffaloes, giraffes, and many species of deer and antelopes; but strange to say, not _one_ of these animals is found in Madagascar, or anything like them. There are in Madagascar, according to Wallace’s “Island Life,” and Dr. Hartlaub’s “Birds of Madagascar,” one hundred species of land birds, and only four or five have any kindred in Africa; but in Malaysia and India we find identical species, and on the islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez, Bourbon and the Seychelles group we find so many curious birds without wings, with similar kindred in Madagascar, that we know these islands have been connected.

The Seychelles group, two hundred by three hundred miles in extent, are seven hundred miles northeast from Madagascar, and have fifteen peculiar species of birds, while three of them are found in Madagascar, and some have kindred in India.

There are five species of lizards which are found in Mauritius, Bourbon, Rodriguez and Ceylon, and even to the Philippine Islands.

The Mascarene group contains one thousand and fifty-eight species of plants, of which sixty-six are found in Africa but not in Asia, and eighty-six are found in Asia and not in Africa, showing a closer relation to Asia than to Africa. Milne-Edwards has even surmised a “Mascarene” continent, to include all the outlying islands around Madagascar. Beccari, in his work on the geographical distribution of palms, after noting the difficulties of the dispersion of the fruits, reaches the conclusion that, when we find two congeneric species of palms on widely separated lands, it is reasonable to infer that these lands have been united. On the Mascarene Islands, in Ceylon, the Nicobars, at Singapore, on the Malaccas, New Guinea, in Australia and Polynesia occur various species of _Phychosperma_, all very difficult of dissemination, and hence could have reached their present habitat only by being connected by intervening lands now in the ocean bed. Winchell, in his “Pre-Adamites,” states among his principles: 1st, The doctrine of pre-Adamites is entirely consonant with the fundamental principles of Biblical Christianity; 2d, A chain of profound relationship runs through the constitution of all races, and they may be regarded as genealogically connected together; 3d, The initial point of the genealogical line may be located in Lemuria.

Peschell, in his “Races of Man,” says: “This continent, which would correspond with the Indian Ethiopia of Claudius Ptolemæus, is required by anthropology, for we can then conceive how the inferior populations of Australia and India, the Papuans of the East India Islands, and lastly the Negroes, would thus be enabled to reach their present abode by dry land.” The selection of this spot is far more orthodox than it might at the first glance appear, for we here find ourselves in the neighborhood of the four enigmatical rivers of the scriptural Eden—in the vicinity of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Indus. By the gradual submergence of Lemuria, the expulsion from Paradise would also be inexorably accomplished. To this he adds the arguments of such ecclesiastical writers as Lactantius, the venerable Bede, Hrabanus Maurus, Cosmas Indicopleustes and the anonymous geographer of Ravenna. In the second chapter of Genesis we read: “A river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and came into four heads.” Whether such a river exists to-day, I know not. Dr. McCausland, in his “Adam and Adamite,” believes that Eden was on the west bank of the modern Euphrates, near the Persian Gulf. He says the Pison river of Genesis, in conjunction with the modern Karùn, is the Pasitigris of the ancients, which runs through the country of Evilat or Havillah, and flows into the Euphrates before it falls into the Persian Gulf. The second is the modern Karashú, the Gyndes of the ancients, which traverses the land of Cush. The Hiddekel is plainly the Tigris, and is designated in Daniel x. 4, and runs westward to Assyria.

We know by the remains of sea-shells that the Great Desert of Sahara was once the bottom of the ocean, and its elevation may have been consonant with and the direct cause of the submergence of Lemuria.

Alfred Wallace says none but the unscientific have revived Atlantis since Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and Prof. Asa Grey on “The Affinity of North American and Asiatic Floras.” It is not my desire to pose as unscientific, nor to construct a highway for the Polearctic or Nearctic fauna and flora, but to prove that the anthropological and ethnological affinities of the Nahuatl tribes deserve a newer and better classification; and if the restoration of Atlantis will accomplish that end, then let the theory stand or fall on its merits.

If Lemuria can be established by affinity, why not accept as much of such collateral evidence concerning Atlantis as is compatible with science.

The Pacific Ocean is not stormy. Winchell says South America was peopled by Mongoloids from the Polynesian Islands. Since no storms prevail there, the theory would indicate a design on the inhabitants to seek new shores, which lay so many hundred miles away, across a sea where storms would never carry them by accident; but in the peopling of Central America from the East, the stormy Atlantic and unvarying trade winds would carry any unwary voyager who strayed too far from shore. As to the establishing of scientific data in support of Atlantis, I have to add that it is probably a short while before the acceptance will be as universal as Lemuria.

In 1873 Her Majesty’s ship _Challenger_ made soundings in the Atlantic off the north coast of Africa, and in 1874 the German frigate _Gazelle_ made further soundings in the same region.

In 1877 Commander Gorringe, of the U. S. sloop _Gettysburg_, discovered, about one hundred and fifty miles from the Straits of Gibraltar, an immense bed of pink coral in thirty-two fathoms of water.

“These various series of soundings, when located on a map, indicate the existence of an extended bank of comparatively shallow water, in the midst of which the Canaries and the Madeiras rise to the surface. The location of the newly discovered mountain in the Atlantic lies within the fifteen-thousand-fathom line, and here is probably the stump of the ancient Atlantis.”

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).