370.) And these facts are the more remarkable because, as De Candolle has shown, all the plants historically known to have been first cultivated in Europe still exist there in the wild state. (Ibid.) The inference is strong that the great cereals—wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize—must have been first domesticated in a vast antiquity, or in some continent which has since disappeared, carrying the original wild plants with it.
CEREALS
OF
THE
AGE
OF
STONE
IN
EUROPE
Darwin quotes approvingly the opinion of Mr. Bentham (“Hist. Notes Cult.
Plants”), “as the result of all the most reliable evidence that none of the Ceralia—wheat, rye, barley, and oats —exist or have existed truly wild in their present state.” In the Stone Age of Europe five varieties of wheat and three of barley were cultivated. (Darwin, “Animals and Plants,” vol. i., p. 382.) He says that it may be inferred, from the presence in the lake habitations of Switzerland of a variety of wheat known as the Egyptian wheat, and from the nature of the weeds that grew among their crops, “that the lake inhabitants either still kept up commercial intercourse with some southern people, or had originally proceeded as colonists from the south.” I should argue that they were colonists from the land where wheat and barley were first domesticated, to wit, Atlantis. And when the Bronze Age came, we find oats and rye making their appearance with the weapons of bronze, together with a peculiar kind of pea. Darwin concludes (Ibid., vol. i., p. 385) that wheat, barley, rye, and oats were either descended from ten or fifteen distinct species, “most of which are now unknown or extinct,” or from four or eight species closely resembling our present forms, or so “widely different as to escape identification;” in which latter case, he says, “man must have cultivated the cereals at an enormously remote period,” and at that time practised “some degree of selection.”
Rawlinson (“Ancient Monarchies,” vol. i., p. 578) expresses the opinion that the ancient Assyrians possessed the pineapple. “The representation on the monuments is so exact that I can scarcely doubt the pineapple being intended.” (See Layard’s “Nineveh and Babylon,” p. 338.) The pineapple (Bromelia ananassa) is supposed to be of American origin, and unknown to Europe before the time of Columbus; and yet, apart from the revelations of the Assyrian monuments, there has been some dispute upon this point. (“Amer. Cyclop.,” vol. xiii., p. .528.) ANCIENT IRISH PIPES
It is not even certain that the use of tobacco was not known to the colonists from Atlantis settled in Ireland in an age long prior to Sir Walter Raleigh. Great numbers of pipes have been found in the raths and tumuli of Ireland, which, there is every reason to believe, were placed there by men of the Prehistoric Period. The illustration on p. 63
represents some of the so-called “Danes’ pipes” now in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy. The Danes entered Ireland many centuries before the time of Columbus, and if the pipes are theirs, they must have used tobacco, or some substitute for it, at that early period. It is probable, however, that the tumuli of Ireland antedate the Danes thousands of years.
ANCIENT
INDIAN
PIPE
,
NEW
JERSEY
Compare these pipes from the ancient mounds of Ireland with the accompanying picture of an Indian pipe of the Stone Age of New Jersey.
(“Smithsonian Rep.,” 1875, p. 342.)
Recent Portuguese travellers have found the most remote tribes of savage negroes in Africa, holding no commercial intercourse with Europeans, using strangely shaped pipes, in which they smoked a plant of the country. Investigations in America lead to the conclusion that tobacco was first burnt as an incense to the gods, the priest alone using the pipe; and from this beginning the extraordinary practice spread to the people, and thence over all the world. It may have crossed the Atlantic in a remote age, and have subsequently disappeared with the failure of retrograding colonists to raise the tobacco-plant.
PART II. THE DELUGE.
CHAPTER I.
THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS DESCRIBED IN THE DELUGE LEGENDS.
Having demonstrated, as we think successfully, that there is no improbability in the statement of Plato that a large island, almost a continent, existed in the past in the Atlantic Ocean, nay, more, that it is a geological certainty that it did exist; and having further shown that it is not improbable but very possible that it may have sunk beneath the sea in the manner described by Plato, we come now to the next question, Is the memory of this gigantic catastrophe preserved among the traditions of mankind? We think there can be no doubt that an affirmative answer must be given to this question.
An event, which in a few hours destroyed, amid horrible convulsions, an entire country, with all its vast population-that Population the ancestors of the great races of both continents, and they themselves the custodians of the civilization of their age-could not fail to impress with terrible force the minds of men, and to project its gloomy shadow over all human history. And hence, whether we turn to the Hebrews, the Aryans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Cushites, or the inhabitants of America, we find everywhere traditions of the Deluge; and we shall see that all these traditions point unmistakably to the destruction of Atlantis.
