444 
The Cradle of Civilisation . 
[October, 
to have subjected the writing to any chemical test so as to 
prove the absence of iron. He assumes the writing to be 
very old, and then infers, from its deep blackness, the ab- 
sence of iron ! But even supposing Dr. Ottema’s conjecture 
to be correCt, and that the ink is free from iron, this proves 
nothing. “ Fine lines carefully traced with lead ” can be 
produced in this degenerate nineteenth century quite as well 
as in the thirteenth. As a contemporary remarks, “ A mo- 
dern scribe is under no legal or moral obligation to put iron 
in his ink,” — more especially if his objeCt is the not very 
moral one of literary forgery. There is therefore nothing 
in the ink or the characters which can speak in favour of 
1256 rather than 1847 as the date of its composition. 
The work professes to give fragments of the early history 
of the Frisians from the date of 2193 B.c. down to the times 
of Alexander the Great and his immediate successors. The 
author of the latter part of the book is assumed to have 
been a contemporary of Julius Caesar, whilst the first por- 
tion, written by Adela, extends backwards to 558 B.c. Here 
the critical — not to say the sceptical — reader will be at once 
struck with a new difficulty. Admitting the manuscript to 
be authentic, and granting that its successive portions were 
first committed to writing at the dates just mentioned, what 
bridges over the gulf of 1500 years between the composition 
of the book and the earliest events therein recorded ? If 
books, who preserved them, and who guarantees their 
authenticity or their very existence ? If tradition, in how 
far can it be accepted ? Suppose, for instance, that the 
only existing accounts of Julius Caesar were found in a work 
ostensibly written a.d. 1500, would they not be looked upon 
with great and deserved suspicion ? 
The alleged Frisian chronology takes its rise from the 
submersion of the old land, Aldland or Atland, which ex- 
tended “ far to the west of Jutland, and of which Heligoland 
and the islands of North Friesland are the last barren rem- 
nants.” This event, we are told, “ is known by geologists 
as the Cimbrian flood.” Now, that a great submergence of 
land may at one time or other have taken place where now 
the North Sea extends is not to be denied. It is supposed, 
with good show of reason, that Britain was once part and 
parcel of the European continent, but has been severed 
either by an extensive subsidence or by an alteration in the 
position of the earth’s centre of gravity which deepened the 
waters in northern latitudes. But Dr. Ottema, on the faith 
of the “ Oera Linda Book,” seeks to identify this vanished 
Atland with Plato’s Atlantis. It is true all earlier tradition 
