We find among the Irish of to-day many Oriental customs.  The game of “jacks,” or throwing up five pebbles and catching them on the back of the hand, was known in Rome.  “The Irish keen (caoine), or the lament over the dead, may still be heard in Algeria and Upper Egypt, even as Herodotus heard it chanted by the Libyan women.”  The same practice existed among the Egyptians, Etruscans, and Romans.  The Irish wakes are identical with the funeral feasts of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans.  (Cusack’s “History of Ireland,” p. 141.) The Irish custom of saying “God bless you!” when one sneezes, is a very ancient practice; it was known to the Romans, and referred, it is said, to a plague in the remote past, whose first symptom was sneezing.

We find many points of resemblance between the customs of the Irish and those of the Hindoo.  The practice of the creditor fasting at the door-step of his debtor until he is paid, is known to both countries; the kindly “God save you!” is the same as the Eastern “God be gracious to you, my son!” The reverence for the wren in Ireland and Scotland reminds us of the Oriental and Greek respect for that bird.  The practice of pilgrimages, fasting, bodily macerations, and devotion to holy wells and particular places, extends from Ireland to India.

All these things speak of a common origin; this fact has been generally recognized, but it has always been interpreted that the Irish camp, from the East, and were in fact a migration of Hindoos.  There is not the slightest evidence to sustain this theory.  The Hindoos have never within the knowledge of man sent out colonies or fleets for exploration; but there is abundant evidence, on the other hand, of migrations from Atlantis eastward.  And how could the Sanscrit writings have preserved maps of Ireland, England, and Spain, giving the shape and outline of their coasts, and their very names, and yet have preserved no memory of the expeditions or colonizations by which they acquired that knowledge?

Another proof of our theory is found in “the round-towers” of Ireland.  Attempts have been made to show, by Dr. Petrie and others, that these extraordinary structures are of modern origin, and were built by the Christian priests, in which to keep their church-plate.  But it is shown that the “Annals of Ulster” mention the destruction of fifty-seven of them by an earthquake in A.D. 448; and Giraldus Cambrensis shows that Lough Neagh was created by an inundation, or sinking of the laud, in A.D. 65, and that in his day the fishermen could

“See the round-towers of other days
In the waves beneath them shining.”

Moreover, we find Diodorus Siculus, in a well-known passage, referring to Ireland, and describing it as “an island in the ocean over against Gaul, to the north, and not inferior in size to Sicily, the soil of which is so fruitful that they mow there twice in the year.”  He mentions the skill of their harpers, their sacred groves, and their singular temples of round form.