14.  When we consider it closely, one of the most extraordinary customs ever known to mankind is that to which I have already alluded in a preceding chapter, to wit, the embalming of the body of the dead man, with a purpose that the body itself may live again in a future state.  To arrive at this practice several things must coexist: 

a.  The people must be highly religious, and possessed of an organized and influential priesthood, to perpetuate so troublesome a custom from age to age.

b.  They must believe implicitly in the immortality of the soul; and this implies a belief in rewards and punishments after death; in a heaven and a hell.

c.  They must believe in the immortality of the body, and its resurrection from the grave on some day of judgment in the distant future.

d.  But a belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body is not enough, for all Christian nations hold to these beliefs; they must supplement these with a determination that the body shall not perish; that the very flesh and blood in which the man died shall rise with him on the last day, and not a merely spiritual body.

Now all these four things must coexist before a people proceed to embalm their dead for religious purposes.  The probability that all these four things should coexist by accident in several widely separated races is slight indeed.  The doctrine of chances is all against it.  There is here no common necessity driving men to the same expedient, with which so many resemblances have been explained; the practice is a religious ceremony, growing out of religious beliefs by no means common or universal, to wit, that the man who is dead shall live again, and live again in the very body in which he died.  Not even all the Jews believed in these things.

If, then, it should appear that among the races which we claim were descended from Atlantis this practice of embalming the dead is found, and nowhere else, we have certainly furnished evidence which can only be explained by admitting the existence of Atlantis, and of some great religious race dwelling on Atlantis, who believed in the immortality of soul and body, and who embalmed their dead.  We find, as I have shown: 

First.  That the Guanches of the Canary Islands, supposed to be a remnant of the Atlantean population, preserved their dead as mummies.

Second.  That the Egyptians, the oldest colony of Atlantis, embalmed their dead in such vast multitudes that they are now exported by the ton to England, and ground up into manures to grow English turnips.

Third.  That the Assyrians, the Ethiopians, the Persians, the Greeks, and even the Romans embalmed their dead.

Fourth.  On the American continents we find that the Peruvians, the Central Americans, the Mexicans, and some of the Indian tribes, followed the same practice.

Is it possible to account for this singular custom, reaching through a belt of nations, and completely around the habitable world, without Atlantis?