Phoenicia, Egypt, Chaldea, India, Greece, and Rome passed the torch of civilization from one to the other; but in all that lapse of time they added nothing to the arts which existed at the earliest period of Egyptian history.  In architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, mining, metallurgy, navigation, pottery, glass-ware, the construction of canals, roads, and aqueducts, the arts of Phoenicia and Egypt extended, without material change or improvement, to a period but two or three hundred years ago.  The present age has entered upon a new era; it has added a series of wonderful inventions to the Atlantean list; it has subjugated steam and electricity to the uses of man.  And its work has but commenced:  it will continue until it lifts man to a plane as much higher than the present as the present is above the barbaric condition; and in the future it will be said that between the birth of civilization in Atlantis and the new civilization there stretches a period of many thousands of years, during which mankind did not invent, but simply perpetuated.

Herodotus tells us ("Euterpe,” cxlii.) that, according to the information he received from the Egyptian priests, their written history dated back 11,340 years before his era, or nearly 14,000 years prior to this time.  They introduced him into a spacious temple, and showed him the statues of 341 high-priests who had in turn succeeded each other; and yet the age of Columbus possessed no arts, except that of printing (which was ancient in China), which was not known to the Egyptians; and the civilization of Egypt at its first appearance was of a higher order than at any subsequent period of its history, thus testifying that it drew its greatness from a fountain higher than itself.  It was in its early days that Egypt worshipped one only God; in the later ages this simple and sublime belief was buried under the corruptions of polytheism.  The greatest pyramids were built by the Fourth Dynasty, and so universal was education at that time among the people that the stones with which they were built retain to this day the writing of the workmen.  The first king was Menes.

“At the epoch of Menes,” says Winchell, “the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people.  Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of this first king, Menes, built the palace at Memphis; that he was a physician, and left anatomical books.  All these statements imply that even at this early period the Egyptians were in a high state of civilization.” (Winchell’s “Preadamites,” p. 120.) “In the time of Menes the Egyptians had long been architects, sculptors, painters, mythologists, and theologians.”  Professor Richard Owen says, “Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes.  The pastoral community of a group of nomad families, as portrayed in the Pentateuch, may be admitted as an early step in civilization.  But how far in advance of this stage is a nation administered by