Unless man emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and wisdom, from his brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not have acquired such brain within the limits of the Miocene period, if we are to believe the learned Abbé Bourgeois.
As to the matter of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in Europe among fossils is the “Mentone man” (6ft. 8in.), others may yet be excavated. Nilsson, quoted by Lubbock, states that:
In a tomb of the Neolithic age ... a skeleton of extraordinary size was found in 1807.
It was attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus.
And if in our own day we occasionally find men and women from 7ft. to even 9ft. and 11 ft. high, this only proves—on the law of atavism, or the reäppearance of ancestral features of character—that there was a time when 9ft. and 10ft. was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo-European race.
But as the subject has been sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of these early races and what the moderns now know.
The great nation mentioned by the Egyptian priests, from which descended the forefathers of the Greeks of the age of Troy, and which, as averred, had fought with the Atlantic race, was then, as we see, assuredly no race of Palæolithic savages. Nevertheless, even in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and initiates, no one seems to have preserved any distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest Egyptians had been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages; they were themselves descended from an alien race, and had settled in Egypt some 400,000 years before,[1752] but their Initiates had preserved all the records. Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their possession the statues of 341 kings who had [pg 793] reigned over their little Atlanto-Aryan sub-race.[1753] If we allow only twenty years as an average figure for the reign of each king, the duration of the Egyptian Empire has to be pushed back, from the days of Herodotus, about 17,000 years.
Bunsen allowed the great Pyramid an antiquity of 20,000 years. More modern Archæologists will not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000 years, and generously concede to Thebes, with its hundred gates, 7,000 years from the date of its foundation. And yet there are records which show Egyptian priests—Initiates—journeying in a north-westerly direction, by land, viâ what became later the Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future Phœnician settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until reaching Carnac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, still travelling by land, on the north-western promontory of the New Continent.[1754]
What was the object of their long journey? And how far back must we place the date of such visits? The Archaic Records show the Initiates of the second sub-race of the Âryan family moving from one land to the other for the purpose of supervising the building of menhirs and dolmens, of colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of sepulchre to serve as receptacles for the ashes of generations to come. When did this occur? The fact of their crossing from France to Great Britain by land may give an idea of the date when such a journey could have been performed on terra firma.
It was when: