hundred millions of dollars of gold, nearly all of it taken from the Peruvians as “booty.”  In one of their palaces “they had an artificial garden, the soil of which was made of small pieces of fine gold, and this was artificially planted with different kinds of maize, which were of gold, their stems, leaves, and ears.  Besides this, they had more than twenty sheep (llamas) with their lambs, attended by shepherds, all made of gold.”  In a description of one lot of golden articles, sent to Spain in 1534 by Pizarro, there is mention of “four llamas, ten statues of women of full size, and a cistern of gold, so curious that it excited the wonder of all.”

Can any one read these details and declare Plato’s description of Atlantis to be fabulous, simply because he tells us of the enormous quantities of gold and silver possessed by the people?  Atlantis was the older country, the parent country, the more civilized country; and, doubtless, like the Peruvians, its people regarded the precious metals as sacred to their gods; and they had been accumulating them from all parts of the world for countless ages.  If the story of Plato is true, there now lies beneath the waters of the Atlantic, covered, doubtless, by hundreds of feet of volcanic debris, an amount of gold and silver exceeding many times that brought to Europe from Peru, Mexico, and Central America since the time of Columbus; a treasure which, if brought to light, would revolutionize the financial values of the world.

I have already shown, in the chapter upon the similarities between the civilizations of the Old and New Worlds, some of the remarkable coincidences which existed between the Peruvians and the ancient European races; I will again briefly, refer to a few of them: 

1.  They worshipped the sun, moon, and planets.

2.  They believed in the immortality of the soul.

3.  They believed in the resurrection of the body, and accordingly embalmed their dead.

4.  The priest examined the entrails of the animals offered in sacrifice, and, like the Roman augurs, divined the future from their appearance.

5.  They had an order of women vowed to celibacy-vestal virgins-nuns; and a violation of their vow was punished, in both continents, by their being buried alive.

6.  They divided the year into twelve months.

7.  Their enumeration was by tens; the people were divided into decades and hundreds, like the Anglo-Saxons; and the whole nation into bodies of 500, 1000, and 10,000, with a governor over each.

8.  They possessed castes; and the trade of the father descended to the son, as in India.

9.  They had bards and minstrels, who sung at the great festivals.

10.  Their weapons were the same as those of the Old World, and made after the same pattern.

11.  They drank toasts and invoked blessings.

12.  They built triumphal arches for their returning heroes, and strewed the road before them with leaves and flowers.