[879] There are archæologists, who, like Mr. James Fergusson, deny the great antiquity of even one single monument in India. In his work, “Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples of India,” the author ventures to express the very extraordinary opinion that “Egypt had ceased to be a nation before the earliest of the cave-temples of India was excavated.” In short, he does not admit the existence of any cave anterior to the reign of Asoka, and seems willing to prove that most of these rock-cut temples were executed from the time of that pious Buddhist king, till the destruction of the Andhra dynasty of Maghada, in the beginning of the fifth century. We believe such a claim perfectly arbitrary. Further discoveries are sure to show how erroneous and unwarranted it was.
[880] It is a strange coincidence that when first discovered, America was found to bear among some native tribes the name of Atlanta.
[881] Baldwin: “Prehistoric Nations,” p. 179.
[882] Alberico Vespuzio, the son of Anastasio Vespuzio or Vespuchy, is now gravely doubted in regard to the naming of the New World. Indeed the name is said to have occurred in a work written several centuries before. A. Wilder (Notes).
[883] See Thomas Belt: “The Naturalists in Nicaragua.” London, 1873.
[884] Torfæus: “Historia Vinlandiæ Antiquæ.”
[885] 2 Kings, xxii. 14; 2 Chronicles, xxxiv. 22.
[886] As we are going to press with this chapter, we have received from Paris, through the kindness of the Honorable John L. O’Sullivan, the complete works of Louis Jacolliot in twenty-one volumes. They are chiefly upon India and its old traditions, philosophy, and religion. This indefatigable writer has collected a world of information from various sources, mostly authentic. While we do not accept his personal views on many points, still we freely acknowledge the extreme value of his copious translations from the Indian sacred books. The more so, since we find them corroborating in every respect the assertions we have made. Among other instances is this matter of the submergence of continents in prehistoric days.
In his “Histoire des Vierges: Les Peuples et les Continents Disparus,” he says: “One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific Ocean, an immense continent which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia.
“The high plateaux of Hindustan and Asia, according to this hypothesis, would only have been represented in those distant epochs by great islands contiguous to the central continent.... According to the Brahmans this country had attained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindustan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters, at the time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas to the peoples which inhabited this immense equinoctial continent, and from their speech was derived the Sanscrit.” (We will have something to say of this language in our second volume.)