THE LOST ATLANTIS. 107 
the cuneiform interpretations, that Agu, an ancient king of Babylonia, called himself 
“ King of the Four Races.” He also, assigns to it a relation with others, including its Inca 
equivalent of Tavintinsuzu, the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World. But the extrava- 
gance of regal titles has been the same in widely diverse ages; so that much caution is 
necessary before they can be made a safe basis for comprehensive generalisations. Four 
kings made war against five, in the vale of Siddim ; and when Lot was despoiled and taken 
captive by Chederlaomer, King of Elam, Tidal, King of Nations, and other regal allies, 
Abraham, with no further aid than that of his trained servants, born in his housé, three 
hundred and eighteen in all, smote their combined hosts, and recovered the captives and 
the spoil. Here, at least, it is obvious that “the King of Nations” was somewhat on a par 
with one of the six vassal kings who rowed King Edgar on the River Dee. Certainly, 
within any early period of authentic history, the conceptions of the known world were 
reduced within narrow bounds; and it would be a very comprehensive deduction from 
such slight premises as the legend supplies, to refer it to an age of accurate geographical 
knowledge in which the western. hemisphere was known as one of four worlds, or con- 
tinents. When the Scottish poet, Dunbar, wrote of America, twenty years after the voyage 
of Columbus, he only knew of it as “the new-found isle.” . 
The opinion, universally favoured in the infancy of physical science, of the recurrence 
of convulsions of nature, whereby nations were revolutionised, and vast empires destroyed 
by fire, or engulphed in the ocean, revived with the theories of cataclysmic phenomena in 
the earlier speculations of modern geology ; and has even now its advocates among writers 
who have given little heed to the concurrent opinion of later scientific authorities. Among 
the most zealous adyocates of the idea of a submerged Atlantic continent, the seat of a 
civilisation older than that of Europe, or of the old East, was the late Abbé Brasseur de 
Bourbourg. As an indefatigable and enthusiastic investigator, he occupies a place in the 
history of American archeology somewhat akin to that of his fellow-countryman, M 
Boucher de Perthes, in relation to the paleontological disclosures of Europe. He had the 
undoubted merit of first drawing the attention of the learned world to the native tran- 
scripts of Maya records, the full value of which is only now being adequately recognised. 
His “ Histoire des Nations Civilisées” aims at demonstrating from their religious myths 
and historical traditions the existence of a self-originated civilisation. In his subsequent 
“ Quatre Letters sur le Mexique,” the Abbé adopted, in the most literal form, the venerable 
legend of Atlantis, giving free rein to his imagination in some very fanciful speculations. 
He calls into being, “from the vasty deep,” a submerged continent, or, rather, extension 
of the present America, stretching eastward, and including, as he deems probable, the 
Canary Islands, and other insular survivals of the imaginary Atlantis. Such speculations 
of unregulated zeal are unworthy of serious consideration. But it is not to be wondered at 
that the vague legend, so temptingly set forth in the “ Timæus,” should have kindled the 
imaginations of a class of theorists, who, like the enthusiastic Abbé, are restrained by 
no doubts suggested by scientific indications. So far from geology lending the slightest 
confirmation to the idea of an engulphed Atlantis, Professor Wyville Thomson has shown, 
in his “ Depths of the Sea,” that while oscillations of the land have considerably modified 
the boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean, the geological age of its basin dates as far back, at least, 
as the later Secondary period. The study of its animal life, as revealed in dredging, 
strongly confirms this, disclosing an unbroken continuity of life on the Atlantic sea-bed 
