'"
Can we doubt the reality of events which we thus find confirmed by
religious ceremonies at Athens, in Syria, and on the shores of Central
America?
And we find this succession of great destructions of the Atlantic
continent in the triads of Wales, where traditions are preserved of
"three terrible catastrophes." We are told by the explorations of the
ship Challenger that the higher lands reach in the direction of the
British Islands; and the Celts had traditions that a part of their
country once extended far out into the Atlantic, and was subsequently
destroyed.
And the same succession of destructions is referred to in the Greek
legends, where a deluge of Ogyges--"the most ancient of the kings of
Boeotia or Attica, a quite mythical person, lost in the night of
ages"--preceded that of Deucalion.
We will find hereafter the most ancient hymns of the Aryans praying God
to hold the land firm. The people of Atlantis, having seen their country
thus destroyed, section by section, and judging that their own time must
inevitably come, must have lived under a great and perpetual terror,
which will go far to explain the origin of primeval religion, and the
hold which it took upon the minds of men; and this condition of things
may furnish us a solution of the legends which have come down to us of
their efforts to perpetuate their learning on pillars, and also an
explanation of that other legend of the Tower of Babel, which, as I will
show hereafter, was common to both continents, and in which they sought
to build a tower high enough to escape the Deluge.
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