Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/494

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ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD.

of colonies in Europe, Asia, and America; the same carrying of civilization to the ends of the earth. We have seen colonies from Great Britain going out in the third and fifth centuries to settle on the shores of France, in Brittany, representing one of the nationalities and languages of the mother-country—a race Atlantean in origin. In the same way we may suppose Hamitic emigrations to have gone out from Atlantis to Syria, Egypt, and the Barbary States. If we could imagine Highland Scotch, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish populations emigrating en masse from England in later times, and carrying to their new lands the civilization of England, with peculiar languages not English, we would have a state of things probably more like the migrations which took place from Atlantis. England, with a civilization Atlantean in origin, peopled by races from the same source, is repeating in these modern times the empire of Zeus and Chronos; and, just as we have seen Troy, Egypt, and Greece warring against the parent race, so in later days we have seen Brittany and the United States separating themselves from England, the race characteristics remaining after the governmental connection had ceased.

In religion the Atlanteans had reached all the great thoughts which underlie our modern creeds. They had attained to the conception of one universal, omnipotent, great First Cause. We find the worship of this One God in Peru and in early Egypt. They looked upon the sun as the mighty emblem, type, and instrumentality of this One God. Such a conception could only have come with civilization. It is not until these later days that science has realized the utter dependence of all earthly life upon the sun's rays:

"All applications of animal power may be regarded as derived directly or indirectly from the static chemical power of the vegetable substance by which the various organisms and their capabilities are sustained; and this power, in turn, from the kinetic action of the sun's rays.

Winds and ocean currents, hailstorms and rain, sliding