and Babylon,” pp. 16,17.) Nero used optical
glasses when he watched the fights of the gladiators;
they are supposed to have come from Egypt and the East.
Plutarch speaks of optical instruments used by Archimedes
“to manifest to the eye the largeness of the
sun.” “There are actual astronomical
calculations in existence, with calendars formed upon
them, which eminent astronomers of England and France
admit to be genuine and true, and which carry back
the antiquity of the science of astronomy, together
with the constellations, to within a few years of the
Deluge, even on the longer chronology of the Septuagint.”
("The Miracle in Stone,” p. 142.) Josephus attributes
the invention of the constellations to the family
of the antediluvian Seth, the son of Adam, while Origen
affirms that it was asserted in the Book of Enoch
that in the time of that patriarch the constellations
were already divided and named. The Greeks associated
the origin of astronomy with Atlas and Hercules, Atlantean
kings or heroes. The Egyptians regarded Taut (At?)
or Thoth, or At-hotes, as the originator of both astronomy
and the alphabet; doubtless he represented a civilized
people, by whom their country was originally colonized.
Bailly and others assert that astronomy “must
have been established when the summer solstice was
in the first degree of Virgo, and that the solar and
lunar zodiacs were of similar antiquity, which would
be about four thousand years before, the Christian
era. They suppose the originators to have lived
in about the fortieth degree of north latitude, and
to have been a highly-civilized people.”
It will be remembered that the fortieth degree of
north latitude passed through Atlantis. Plato
knew (” Dialogues, Phaedo,” 108) that the
earth “is a body in the centre of the heavens”
held in equipoise. He speaks of it as a “round
body,” a “globe;” he even understood
that it revolved on its axis, and that these revolutions
produced day and night. He says—“Dialogues,
Timaeus”—“The earth circling
around the pole (which is extended through the universe)
be made to be the artificer of night and day.”
All this Greek learning was probably drawn from the
Egyptians.
Only among the Atlanteans in Europe and America do we find traditions preserved as to the origin of all the principal inventions which have raised man from a savage to a civilized condition. We can give in part the very names of the inventors.
Starting with the Chippeway legends, and following with the Bible and Phoenician records, we make a table like the appended:
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