anthropomorphizing objects in Nature.  One has to learn the difference between the two modes before attempting to classify them under one nomenclature.  An earthquake has just engulfed over 80,000 people (87,903) in Sunda Straits.  These were mostly Malays, savages with whom but few had relations, and the dire event will be soon forgotten.  Had a portion of Great Britain been thus swept away instead, the whole world would have been in commotion, and yet, a few thousand years hence, even such an event would have passed out of man’s memory; and a future Gerald Massey might be found speculating upon the astronomical character and signification of the Isles of Wight, Jersey, or Man, arguing, perhaps, that this latter island had not contained a real living race of men but “belonged to astronomical mythology,” was a “Man submerged in celestial waters.”  If the legend of the lost Atlantis is only “like those of Airyana-Vaejo and Jambu-dvipa,” it is terrestrial enough, and therefore “the mythological origin of the Deluge legend” is so far an open question.  We claim that it is not “indubitably demonstrated,” however clever the theoretical demonstration. ---------

Such are the criticisms passed, such the “historical difficulty.”  The culprits arraigned are fully alive to their perilous situation; nevertheless, they maintain the statement.  The only thing which may perhaps here be objected to is, that the names of the two nations are incorrectly used.  It may be argued that to refer to the remote ancestors and their descendants equally as “Greeks and Romans,” is an anachronism as marked as would be the calling of the ancient Keltic Gauls, or the Insubres, Frenchmen.  As a matter of fact this is true.  But, besides the very plausible excuse that the names used were embodied in a private letter, written as usual in great haste, and which was hardly worthy of the honour of being quoted verbatim with all its imperfections, there may perhaps exist still weightier objections to calling the said people by any other name.  One misnomer is as good as another; and to refer to old Greeks and Romans in a private letter as the old Hellenes from Hellas or Magna Graecia, and the Latins as from Latium, would have been, besides looking pedantic, just as incorrect as the use of the appellation noted, though it may have sounded, perchance, more “historical.”  The truth is that, like the ancestors of nearly all the Indo-Europeans (or shall we say Indo-Germanic Japhetidae?), the Greek and Roman sub-races mentioned have to be traced much farther back.  Their origin must be carried far into the mists of that “prehistoric” period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice.  The Atlantean “old Greeks” could not be designated even as the Autochthones—­a