'This also applies to the conversion of wild plants and grasses into cultivated flowers, orchards, and reapable crops. It is a singular fact, that despite their great range of species, we owe hardly a dozen useful plants to Australia, South Africa, America north of Mexico, New Zealand, or America, south of the River Plate. What is even more strange is, that of more than one third of our cultivated species we have no trace whatever of the wild originals. All our great cereals—wheat, oats, barley, rye and maize—must have been first domesticated in a vast antiquity or in some portion of the globe which has disappeared carrying many of their parent wild plants with it.
'Where could such a place have been. Have we a pointer to it? Yes, for we find the homes of many others which we can trace to be in the mainland regions bordering on the central Atlantic. Innumerable trees and plants are common to Europe and the Atlantic states of America yet are not to be found west of the Rocky mountains. Upon the Pacific coast there are no hollys, burr-woods, lindens, gums, elms, mulberrys, hickorys or beeches. How, if they could not cross the comparatively narrow mountain barriers could they have passed from one side of the great ocean to the other unless, at one time, there had been fertile land and chains of islands, between.'
'Seeds are carried by the sea and by birds,' suggested the McKay.
The Doctor stared at him. 'That is true and it might have happened in a few rare cases, but not more—over such a great distance, and why please did not the sea and the birds carry the same seeds to the fertile sunny shores of South Africa? No. A central Atlantic continent is the only practical solution to the problem. That was the nursery where, through countless generations, from a state of primitive husbandry up to that of trained horticulturists, men must have laboured to produce and perfect practically every cereal, fruit and vegetable which we eat today.'
'All right, I'll give you that,' grinned the McKay.
'Good. We go on then,' the Doctor leaned forward again:
'The description of the wealth and magnificence of Poseidon's temple may at first seem overstrained in Plato's account, but we have its parallel in the great temple of the Sun god of the Incas at Chuzco in Peru. When this was first visited by Pizarro thirty years after Columbus discovered America he states that it was a veritable mine of gold. Images, pillars, cornices, and even the flowers in the sacred garden being fashioned from the precious metal. The gold from that astounding temple was shipped home in the Spanish treasure fleets and, although it has been reminted many times in various currencies, its bulk was so great that it still represents a considerable portion of the gold currency in circulation in the world today.
'To leave Plato now and note various other correspondences. Our biblical legend states that Noah was the hero of the Flood. The ancient Mexicans had a similar story and a similar hero, they called him Nata, or Noe. In yet another aboriginal American tongue he is known as Hurakan, which has a strange resemblance to our own word hurricane, and they may well have christened him that on account of his coming up out of the great tempestuous waters.
'The Mandan Indians, although an inland people, preserve amongst them as the central focus of their religion an Ark, which they term the Big Canoe. Each year one of their witch doctors is painted white all over and comes among them as the white man who arrived from the waters bringing them peace, civilisation and prosperity.
'Our Bible story tells us that Noah caulked the seams of the Ark with asphalt and we find the greatest pitch lakes in the West Indies. Further we are told that God gave the rainbow as His sign that He would never again destroy the earth by a deluge. This is also the belief of the Peruvians.
'The Mexicans, like ourselves, baptised children with a view to cleansing them from original sin. They mummified their dead as did the Egyptians; and many curious unnatural customs with regard to childbirth are common to both hemispheres.
'Even the place names of Central America and the earliest civilised regions of the Mediterranean bear a resemblance which it is almost impossible to explain except by the
Atlantean theory. Choi Zuivana, Colua and Cholitna are four ancient Armenian towns. In Centra) America we have Chol-ula, Zuivan, Colua-can and Colima. The gods Pan and Mais of the Greeks are to be found as Pan and Maya in Central American mythology. The god of the Welsh, Hu the Mighty is found in Hu-natu, the hero god of the American Quiche Indians. Bel or Baal, the Phoenician deity whose cult is to be found in all parts of Europe, is represented almost as strongly by Balam among many tribes of American aborigines. And perhaps more important than any of these the great Sun god Ra of Egypt is identical with the Peruvian .Sun god Ra-mi.
'Examine resemblances between the Chiapenee American Indian and Hebrew. "Son" in one is Been, in the other Ben, "daughter" Batz in the first and Bath in the second, "father" Abagh in one, Abba in the other. "King" is Molo--'
'Hi stop!' exclaimed Nicky. This is getting too much for me. Let's get on to something else.'
'I regret Herr Costello if I bore you,' the Doctor said frigidity, but these explanations are necessary to prove my case. I shall not detain you much longer.'
'I'm sorry,' Nicky apologised, 'forget it please and go right on with what you want to say.'
'I thank you. The very word Atlantis speaks for itself. Atlas, we are told, was the first King of Atlantis and gave his name to the Atlantic ocean, the Mexican word All means water. There is an Atlas Mountain in Morocco, a town called Atlan on the shores of Central America. The Atlantes were a people well known to the Greeks and Romans who lived on the North West coast of Africa. In Central America we have the Aztecs, whose history states they originally came from a country called Azland. What can be clearer than the association between these two opposite points in the Atlantic ocean.
'In Plato's account of Atlantis he speaks of a vast canal system, great harbours, bridges and fortifications. The Peruvian roads and bridges through the passes of the Andes were feats of engineering which have hardly been surpassed in the modern world. The canal system in Egypt alone enabled a sufficient area to be placed under cultivation for so great a population to exist in the restricted valley of the
Nile. The artificial lake of Moesis, which they created as a
reservoir, was 450 miles in circumference and 350 feet deep with subterranean channels, flood gates, locks and dams by which the wilderness was reclaimed from sterility. The Mexicans and the Egyptians both erected stone structures, similar in type, which are larger and more durable than anything modern civilisation has yet produced—their Pyramids. Owing to their inaccessibility to the ordinary traveller it is not sufficiently recognised that those in the New World are greater than those in the Old. The base of the pyramid at Choula covers 45 acres of land compared to the 12 acres covercd by the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The masonry of both people had reached such a degree of accuracy that the joints in their stone work are scarcely perceptible and not wider than the thickness of silver paper. Both had astrological systems showing a degree of scientific exactitude with which we have caught up only in the last century yet, neither of these amazing civilisations had any infancy and their art has no archaic period.