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* This is not to be construed to mean that 12,000 years hence there will
be yet any man of the 6th Race, or that the 5th will be submerged.   The
figures are given simply for the sake of a better comparison with the
present objection in the case of the Greeks and Atlantis.
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The “historical difficulty” arises from a certain authoritative statement made by Orientalists on philological grounds.  Professor Max Muller has brilliantly demonstrated that Sanskrit was the “elder sister”—­by no means the mother—­of all the modern languages.  As to that “mother,” it is conjectured by himself and colleagues to be a “now extinct tongue, spoken probably by the nascent Aryan race.”  When asked what was this language, the Western voice answers:  “Who can tell?” When, “during what geological periods did this nascent race flourish?” the same impressive voice replies:  “In prehistoric ages, the duration of which no one can now determine.”  Yet it must have been Sanskrit, however barbarous and unpolished, since “the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans and Kelts” were living within “the same precincts” with that nascent race, and the testimony borne by language has enabled the philologist to trace the “language of the gods” in the speech of every Aryan nation.  Meanwhile it is affirmed by these same Orientalists that classical Sanskrit has its origin at the very threshold of the Christian era; while Vedic Sanskrit is allowed an antiquity of hardly 3,000 years (if so much) before that time.

Now, Atlantis, on the statement of the “Adepts,” sank over 9,000 years before the Christian era.* How then can one maintain that the “old Greeks and Romans” were Atlanteans?  How can that be, since both nations are Aryans, and the genesis of their languages is Sanskrit?  Moreover, the Western scholars know that the Greek and Latin languages were formed within historical periods, the Greeks and Latins themselves having no existence as nations 11,000 B.C..  Surely they who advance such a proposition do not realize how very unscientific is their statement!

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* The position recently taken up by Mr. Gerald Massey in Light that the
story of Atlantis is not a geological event but an ancient astronomical
myth, is rather imprudent.   Mr. Massey, notwithstanding his rare
intuitional faculties and great learning, is one of those writers in
whom the intensity of research bent into one direction has biased his
otherwise clear understanding.   Because Hercules is now a constellation
it does not follow that there never was a hero of this name.   Because
the Noachian Universal Deluge is now proved a fiction based upon
geological and geographical ignorance, it does not, therefore, appear
that there were not many local deluges in prehistoric ages.   The
ancients connected every terrestrial event with the celestial bodies. 
They traced the history of their great deified heroes and memorialized
it in stellar configurations as often as they personified pure myths,