The Duke of Argyll ("The Unity of Nature”) says: 

“We have found in the most ancient records of the Aryan language proof that the indications of religious thought are higher, simpler, and purer as we go back in time, until at last, in the very oldest compositions of human speech which have come down to us, we find the Divine Being spoken of in the sublime language which forms the opening of the Lord’s Prayer.  The date in absolute chronology of the oldest Vedic literature does not seem to be known.  Professor Max Mueller, however, considers that it may possibly take us back 5000 years. . . .  All we can see with certainty is that the earliest inventions of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has ever made. . . .  The first use of fire, and the discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of wild animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were first developed out of some wild grasses-these are all discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare.  They are all unknown to history—­all lost in the light of an effulgent dawn.”

The Atlanteans possessed an established order of priests; their religious worship was pure and simple.  They lived under a kingly government; they had their courts, their judges, their records, their monuments covered with inscriptions, their mines, their founderies, their workshops, their looms, their grist-mills, their boats and sailing-vessels, their highways, aqueducts, wharves, docks, and canals.  They had processions, banners, and triumphal arches for their kings and heroes; they built pyramids, temples, round-towers, and obelisks; they practised religious ablutions; they knew the use of the magnet and of gunpowder.  In short, they were in the enjoyment of a civilization nearly as high as our own, lacking only the printing-press, and those inventions in which steam, electricity, and magnetism are used.  We are told that Deva-Nahusha visited his colonies in Farther India.  An empire which reached from the Andes to Hindostan, if not to China, must have been magnificent indeed.  In ’its markets must have met the maize of the Mississippi Valley, the copper of Lake Superior, the gold and silver of Peru and Mexico, the spices of India, the tin of Wales and Cornwall, the bronze of Iberia, the amber of the Baltic, the wheat and barley of Greece, Italy, and Switzerland.

It is not surprising that when this mighty nation sank beneath the waves, in the midst of terrible convulsions, with all its millions of people, the event left an everlasting impression upon the imagination of mankind.  Let us suppose that Great Britain should to-morrow meet with a similar fate.  What a wild consternation would fall upon her colonies and upon the whole human family!  The world might relapse into barbarism, deep and almost universal.  William the Conqueror, Richard Coeur de Lion, Alfred the Great, Cromwell,