Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/430

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ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD.

of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. We are told that the sons of Japheth were Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. We are then given the names of the descendants of Gomer and Javan, but not of Magog. Josephus says the sons of Magog were the Scythians. The Irish annals take up the genealogy of Magog's family where the Bible leaves it. The Book of Invasions, the "Cin of Drom-Snechta," claims that these Scythians were the Phœnicians; and we are told that a branch of this family were driven out of Egypt in the time of Moses: "He wandered through Africa for forty-two years, and passed by the lake of Salivœ to the altars of the Philistines, and between Rusicada and the mountains Azure, and he came by the river Monlon, and by the sea to the Pillars of Hercules, and through the Tuscan sea, and he made for Spain, and dwelt there many years, and he increased and multiplied, and his people were multiplied."

From all these facts it appears that the population of Ireland came from the West, and not from Asia—that it was one of the many waves of population flowing out from the Island of Atlantis—and herein we find the explanation of that problem which has puzzled the Aryan scholars. As Ireland is farther from the Punjab than Persia, Greece, Rome, or Scandinavia, it would follow that the Celtic wave of migration must have been the earliest sent out from the Sanscrit centre; but it is now asserted by Professor Schleicher and others that the Celtic tongue shows that it separated from the Sanscrit original tongue later than the others, and that it is more closely allied to the Latin than any other Aryan tongue. This is entirely inexplicable upon any theory of an Eastern origin of the Indo-European races, but very easily understood if we recognize the Aryan and Celtic migrations as going out about the same time from the Atlantean fountain-head.

There are many points confirmatory of this belief. In the first place, the civilization of the Irish dates back to a vast