Civilization an inheritance.

Material civilization might be defined to be the result of a series of inventions and discoveries, whereby man improves his condition, and controls the forces of nature for his own advantage.

The savage man is a pitiable creature; as Menabosbu says, in the Chippeway legends, he is pursued by a “perpetual hunger;” he is exposed unprotected to the blasts of winter and the heats of summer.  A great terror sits upon his soul; for every manifestation of nature—­the storm, the wind, the thunder, the lightning, the cold, the heat—­all are threatening and dangerous demons.  The seasons bring him neither seed-time nor harvest; pinched with hunger, appeasing in part the everlasting craving of his stomach with seeds, berries, and creeping things, he sees the animals of the forest dash by him, and he has no means to arrest their flight.  He is powerless and miserable in the midst of plenty.  Every step toward civilization is a step of conquest over nature.  The invention of the bow and arrow was, in its time, a far greater stride forward for the human race than the steam-engine or the telegraph.  The savage could now reach his game—­his insatiable hunger could be satisfied; the very eagle, “towering in its pride of place,” was not beyond the reach of this new and wonderful weapon.  The discovery of fire and the art of cooking was another immense step forward.  The savage, having nothing but wooden vessels in which to cook, covered the wood with clay; the day hardened in the fire.  The savage gradually learned that he could dispense with the wood, and thus pottery was invented.  Then some one (if we are to believe the Chippeway legends, on the shores of Lake Superior) found fragments of the pure copper of that region, beat them into shape, and the art of metallurgy was begun; iron was first worked in the same way by shaping meteoric iron into spear-heads.

But it must not be supposed that these inventions followed one another in rapid succession.  Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of years intervened between each step; many savage races have not to this day achieved some of these steps.  Prof.  Richard Owen says, “Unprepossessed and sober experience teaches that arts, language, literature are of slow growth, the results of gradual development.”

I shall undertake to show hereafter that nearly all the arts essential to civilization which we possess date back to the time of Atlantis—­certainly to that ancient Egyptian civilization which was coeval with, and an outgrowth from, Atlantis.

In six thousand years the world made no advance on the civilization which it received from Atlantis.