These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the [last local] Flood [in Asia], or Age of Horror.
And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Âryan historical memory—the Flood which submerged the last portions of Atlantis 850,000 years ago. The Floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.
The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), and the Third Race ended its career in Lankâ, or rather on that which became Lankâ with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lankâ, while the enormous Island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic Continent already described. As a Master says:
Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continents explored and fathomed by them ... there may be hidden, deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to reäppear again, and bear their new groups of mankind and civilizations; and that at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down, and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?[744]
Not identically the same Continents, of course. But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern Lemuria. The prolongation of that great Continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the [pg 348] cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden—which every Geologist regards as the mouth of a former great river—is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary age. The former actual existence of this river is a fact of Science—its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold Seemann not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent—thus corroborating the whole “horse-shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the elevated ridge in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a south-easterly line toward the African coast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d'Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean.[745]
The Atlantic portion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis, but which must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root-Race. Just as in the case of Race evolution, so in that of the shifting and re-shifting of Continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn as to where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth-Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third-Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest Occult authority, that:
Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis Continent, than Europe with America.[746]
The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. New discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claim of the Asiatic Philosophers, that sciences—Geology, Ethnology, and History included—were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived untold ages ago. Future “finds” will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Âryans of India, Chaldæans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations lasting “myriads of centuries”;[747] and the latter points to the fact that:
Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature.[748]
To this Professor R. Owen adds that: