The Burgh of Moussa, in the shetlands

We find similar structures in America, Sardinia, and India.  The remains of similar round-towers are very abundant in the Orkneys and Shetlands.  “They have been supposed by some,” says Sir John Lubbock, “to be Scandinavian, but no similar buildings exist in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, so that this style of architecture is no doubt anterior to the arrival of the Northmen.”  I give above a picture of the Burgh or Broch of the little island of Moussa, in the Shetlands.  It is circular in form, forty-one feet in height.  Open at the top; the central space is twenty feet in diameter, the walls about fourteen feet thick at the base, and eight feet at the top.  They contain a staircase, which leads to the top of the building.  Similar structures are found in the Island of Sardinia.

         Round-tower of the Canyon of the Mancos, Colorado, U.S.

In New Mexico and Colorado the remains of round-towers are very abundant.  The illustration below represents our of these in the valley of the Mancos, in the south-western corner of Colorado.  A model of it is to be found in the Smithsonian collection at Washington.  The tower stands at present, in its ruined condition, twenty feet high.  It will be seen that it resembles the towers of Ireland, not only in its circular form but also in the fact that its door-way is situated at some distance from the ground.

It will not do to say that the resemblance between these prehistoric and singular towers, in countries so far apart as Sardinia, Ireland, Colorado, and India, is due to an accidental coincidence.  It might as well be argued that the resemblance between the roots of the various Indo-European languages was also due to accidental coincidence, and did not establish any similarity of origin.  In fact, we might just as well go back to the theory of the philosophers of one hundred and fifty years ago, and say that the resemblance between the fossil forms in the rocks and the living forms upon them did not indicate relationship, or prove that the fossils were the remains of creatures that had once lived, but that it was simply a way nature had of working out extraordinary coincidences in a kind of joke; a sort of “plastic power in nature,” as it was called.

We find another proof that Ireland was settled by the people of Atlantis in the fact that traditions long existed among the Irish peasantry of a land in the “Far West,” and that this belief was especially found among the posterity of the Tuatha-de-Dananns, whose connection with the Formorians we have shown.

The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, in a note to his translation of the “Popol Vuh,” says: