No such absurdity was ever postulated.  The cataclysm that annihilated the choicest sub-races of the Fourth race, or the Atlanteans, was slowly preparing its work for ages; as any one can read in “Esoteric Buddhism” (page 54).  “Poseidonis,” so called, belongs to historical times, though its fate begins to be realized and suspected only now.  What was said is still asserted:  every root-race is separated by a catastrophe, a cataclysm—­the basis and historical foundation of the fables woven later on into the religious fabric of every people, whether civilized or savage, under the names of “deluges,” “showers of fire,” and such like.

That no “appreciable trace is left of such high civilization” is due to several reasons.  One of these may be traced chiefly to the inability, and partially to the unwillingness (or shall we say congenital spiritual blindness of this our age!) of the modern archeologist to distinguish between excavations and ruins 50,000 and 4,000 years old, and to assign to many a grand archaic ruin its proper age and place in prehistoric times.  For the latter the archeologist is not responsible—­for what criterion, what sign has he to lead him to infer the true date of an excavated building bearing no inscription; and what warrant has the public that the antiquary and specialist has not made an error of some 20,000 years?  A fair proof of this we have in the scientific and historic labeling of the Cyclopean architecture.  Traditional archeology bearing directly upon the monumental is rejected.  Oral literature, popular legends, ballads and rites, are all stifled in one word—­ superstition; and popular antiquities have become “fables” and “folk-lore.”  The ruder style of Cyclopean masonry, the walls of Tyrius, mentioned by Homer, are placed at the farthest end—­the dawn of pre-Roman history; the walls of Epirus and Mycenae—­at the nearest.  The latter are commonly believed the work of the Pelasgi and probably of about 1,000 years before the Western era.  As to the former, they were hedged in and driven forward by the Noachian deluge till very lately—­ Archbishop Usher’s learned scheme, computing that earth and man “were created 4,004 B.C.,” having been not only popular but actually forced upon the educated classes until Mr. Darwin’s triumphs.  Had it not been for the efforts of a few Alexandrian and other mystics, Platonists, and heathen philosophers, Europe would have never laid her hands even on those few Greek and Roman classics she now possesses.  And, as among the few that escaped the dire fate not all by any means were trustworthy—­ hence, perhaps, the secret of their preservation—­Western scholars got early into the habit of rejecting all heathen testimony, whenever truth clashed with the dicta of their churches.  Then, again, the modern Archeologists, Orientalists and Historians, are all Europeans; and they are all Christians, whether nominally or otherwise.  However it may be, most of them seem to dislike to allow any relic of archaism to antedate the supposed antiquity of the Jewish records.  This is a ditch into which most have slipped.