The traces of ancient civilizations exist, and they are many.  Yet, it is humbly suggested, that so long as there are reverend gentlemen mixed up unchecked in archaeological and Asiatic societies; and Christian bishops to write the supposed histories and religions of non-Christian nations, and to preside over the meetings of Orientalists—­so long will Archaism and its remains be made subservient in every branch to ancient Judaism and modern Christianity.

So far, archeology knows nothing of the sites of other and far older civilizations, except the few it has stumbled upon, and to which it has assigned their respective ages, mostly under the guidance of biblical chronology.  Whether the West had any right to impose upon Universal History the untrustworthy chronology of a small and unknown Jewish tribe and reject, at the same time, every datum as every other tradition furnished by the classical writers of non-Jewish and non-Christian nations, is questionable.  At any rate, had it accepted as willingly data coming from other sources, it might have assured itself by this time, that not only in Italy and other parts of Europe, but even on sites not very far from those it is accustomed to regard as the hotbed of ancient relics—­Babylonia and Assyria—­there are other sites where it could profitably excavate.  The immense “Salt Valley” of Dasht-Beyad by Khorasson covers the most ancient civilizations of the world; while the Shamo desert has had time to change from sea to land, and from fertile land to a dead desert, since the day when the first civilization of the Fifth Race left its now invisible, and perhaps for ever hidden, “traces” under its beds of sand.

Times have changed, are changing.  Proofs of the old civilizations and the archaic wisdom are accumulating.  Though soldier-bigots and priestly schemers have burnt books and converted old libraries to base uses; though the dry rot and the insect have destroyed inestimably precious records; though within the historic period the Spanish brigands made bonfires of the works of the refined archaic American races, which, if spared, would have solved many a riddle of history; though Omar lit the fires of the Alexandrian baths for months with the literary treasures of the Serapeum; though the Sybilline and other mystical books of Rome and Greece were destroyed in war; though the South Indian invaders of Ceylon “heaped into piles as high as the tops of the cocoanut trees” the ollas of the Buddhists, and set them ablaze to light their victory—­thus obliterating from the world’s knowledge early Buddhist annals and treatises of great importance:  though this hateful and senseless Vandalism has disgraced the career of most fighting nations—­still, despite everything, there are extant abundant proofs of the history of mankind, and bits and scraps come to light from time to time by what science has often called “most curious coincidences.”  Europe has no very trustworthy history of her own vicissitudes and mutations, her