126 WILSON ON ATLANTIS. 
the Pheenician Cadmus. Nor has the generally accepted assumption of a foreign origin 
for American metallurgy been placed as yet on any substantial basis. Gold, as I believe, 
was everywhere the first metal wrought. The bright nugget tempted the savage, with 
whom personal ornaments precede dress. It was readily fashioned into any desired shape. 
The same is true, though in a less degree, of copper; and wherever, as on the American 
continent, native copper abounds, the next step in metallurgy is to be anticipated. With 
the discovery of the economic use of the metals, an all-important step had been achieved, 
leading to the fashioning of usefal tools, to architecture, sculpture, pictorial ornamentation, 
and so to ideography. The facilities for all this were, at least, as abundant in Central 
and Southern America as in Egypt. The progress was, doubtless, slow; but when the 
neolithic age began to yield to that of the metallurgist, the all-important step had been 
taken, The history of this first step is embodied in myths of the New World, no less than 
of the Old. Tubalcain, Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Veelund, Galant, and Wayland the 
Saxon smith-god, are all mere legendary variations of the first mastery of the use of the 
metals ; and so, too, the new world has Quetzalcoatl, its divine instructor in the same 
priceless art. 
It forms one of the indisputable facts of ancient history that, long before Greece 
became the world’s intellectual leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled by maritime 
races, whose adventurous enterprise led them to navigate the Atlantic. There was no 
greater impediment to such adventurous mariners crossing the Atlantic in earliest centuries 
before Christ, than at any subsequent date prior to the revival of navigation in the fifteenth 
century. It would not, therefore, in any degree, surprise me to learn of the discovery 
of a genuine Pheenician, or other inscription; or, of some hoard of Assyrian gryphons, 
or shekels of the merchant princes of Tyre “that had knowledge of the sea,” being 
recovered among the still unexplored treasures of the buried empire of Montezuma, or 
the long deserted ruins of central America. Such a discovery would scarcely be more 
surprising than that of the Punic hoards found at Corvo, the most westerly island of 
the Azores. Yet it would furnish a substantial basis for the legend of Atlantis, akin to 
that which the runic monuments of Kingiktorsoak and Igalikko supplied in confirmation 
of the fabled charms of a Hesperian region lying within the Arctic circle; and of the first, 
actual glimpses of the American mainland by Norse voyagers of the tenth century, as 
told in more than one of their old Sagas. But until such evidence is forthcoming, the 
legendary Atlantis must remain a myth, and pre-Columbian America be still credited 
with a self-achieved progress. 
