The Gauls had even invented a machine on wheels to cut their grain, thus
anticipating our reapers and mowers by two thousand years. The
difference between the civilization of the Romans under Julius Caesar
and the Gauls under Vercingetorix was a difference in degree and not in
kind. The Roman civilization was simply a development and perfection of
the civilization possessed by all the European populations; it was drawn
from the common fountain of Atlantis.
If we find on both sides of the Atlantic precisely the same arts,
sciences, religious beliefs, habits, customs, and traditions, it is
absurd to say that the peoples of the two continents arrived separately,
by precisely the same steps, at precisely the same ends. When we
consider the resemblance of the civilizations of the Mediterranean
nations to one another, no man is silly enough to pretend that Rome,
Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, each spontaneously and separately
invented the arts, sciences, habits, and opinions in which they agreed;
but we proceed to trace out the thread of descent or connection from one
to another. Why should a rule of interpretation prevail, as between the
two sides of the Atlantic, different from that which holds good as to
the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea? If, in the one case, similarity
of origin has unquestionably produced similarity of arts, customs, and
condition, why, in the other, should not similarity of arts, customs,
and condition prove similarity of origin? Is there any instance in the
world of two peoples, without knowledge of or intercourse with each
other, happening upon the same invention, whether that invention be an
arrow-head or a steam-engine? If it required of mankind a lapse of at
least six thousand years before it began anew the work of invention, and
took up the thread of original thought where Atlantis dropped it, what
probability is there of three or four separate nations all advancing at
the same speed to precisely the same arts and opinions? The proposition
is untenable.
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