stuff.  When we read that Jove whipped his wife, and threw her son out of the window, the inference is that Jove was a man, and actually did something like the thing described; certainly gods, sublimated spirits, aerial sprites, do not act after this fashion; and it would puzzle the mythmakers to prove that the sun, moon, or stars whipped their wives or flung recalcitrant young men out of windows.  The history of Atlantis could be in part reconstructed out of the mythology of Greece; it is a history of kings, queens, and princes; of love-making, adulteries, rebellions, wars, murders, sea-voyages, and colonizations; of palaces, temples, workshops, and forges; of sword-making, engraving and metallurgy; of wine, barley, wheat, cattle, sheep, horses, and agriculture generally.  Who can doubt that it represents the history of a real people?

Uranos was the first god; that is to say, the first king of the great race.  As he was at the commencement of all things, his symbol was the sky.  He probably represented the race previous even to the settlement of Atlantis.  He was a son of Gaea (the earth).  He seems to have been the parent of three races—­the Titans, the Hekatoncheires, and the Kyklopes or Cyclops.

I incline to the belief that these were civilized races, and that the peculiarities ascribed to the last two refer to the vessels in which they visited the shores of the barbarians.

The empire of Atlantis.

The empire of the Titans was clearly the empire of Atlantis.  “The most judicious among our mythologists” (says Dr. Rees, “New British Cyclopaedia,” art.  Titans)—­“such as Gerard Vossius, Marsham, Bochart, and Father Thomassin—­are of opinion that the partition of the world among the sons of Noah-Shem, Ham, and Japheth—­was the original of the tradition of the same partition among Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto,” upon the breaking up of the great empire of the Titans.  “The learned Pezron contends that the division which was made of this vast empire came, in after-times, to be taken for the partition of the whole world; that Asia remaining in the hands of Jupiter (Zeus), the most potent of the three brothers, made him looked upon as the god of Olympus; that the sea and islands which fell to Neptune occasioned their giving him the title of ‘god of the sea;’ and that Spain, the extremity of the then known world, thought to be a very low country in respect of Asia, and famous for its excellent mines of gold and silver, failing to Pluto, occasioned him to be taken for the ‘god of the infernal regions.’” We should suppose that Pluto possibly ruled over the transatlantic possessions of Atlantis in America, over those “portions of the opposite continent” which Plato tells us were dominated by Atlas and his posterity, and which, being far beyond or below sunset, were the “under-world” of the ancients; while Atlantis, the Canaries, etc., constituted the island division with Western Africa