"W. Scott-Elliot - Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliot W Scott)

investigation on which more than one qualified person has been engaged, in the
intervals of other activity, for some years past. And to promote the success of
their work they have been allowed access to some maps and other records
physically preserved from the remote periods concerned--though in safer keeping
than in that of the turbulent races occupied in Europe with the development of
civilization in brief intervals of leisure from warfare, and hard pressed by the
fanaticism that so long treated science as sacrilegious during the middle ages
of Europe.
Laborious as the task has been however, it will be recognized as amply repaying
the trouble taken, by everyone who is able to perceive how absolutely necessary
to a proper comprehension of the world as we find it, is a proper comprehension
of its preceding Atlantean phase. Without this knowledge all speculations
concerning ethnology are futile and misleading. The course of race development
is chaos and confusion without the key furnished by the character of Atlantean
civilization and the configuration of the earth at Atlantean periods. Geologists
know that land and ocean surfaces must have repeatedly changed places during the
period at which they also know-from the situation of human remains in the
various strata-that the lands were inhabited. And yet for want of accurate
knowledge as to the dates at which the changes took place, they discard the
whole theory from their practical thinking, and, except for certain hypotheses
started by naturalists dealing with the southern hemisphere, have generally
endeavoured to harmonize race migrations with the configuration of the earth in
existence at the present time.
In this way nonsense is made of the whole retrospect; and the ethnological
scheme remains so vague and shadowy that it fails to displace crude conceptions
of mankind's beginning, which still dominate religious thinking and keep back
the spiritual progress of the age. The decadence and ultimate disappearance of
Atlantean civilization is in turn as instructive as its rise and glory; but I
have now accomplished the main purpose with which I sought leave to introduce
the work now before the world, with a brief prefatory explanation, and if its
contents fail to convey a sense of its importance to any readers I am now
addressing, that result could hardly be accomplished by further recommendations
of mine.
1896
The Story of Atlantis
A Geographical, Historical and Ethnological Sketch
THE GENERAL scope of the subject before us will best be realized by considering
the amount of information that is obtainable about the various nations who
compose our great Fifth or Aryan Race.
From the time of the Greeks and the Romans onwards volumes have been written
about every people who in their turn have filled the stage of history. The
political institutions, the religious beliefs, the social and domestic manners
and customs have all been analyzed and catalogued, and countless works in many
tongues record for our benefit the march of progress.
Further, it must be remembered that of the history of this Fifth Race we possess
but a fragment--the record merely of the last family races of the Celtic
sub-race, and the first family races of our own Teutonic stock.
But the hundreds of thousands of years which elapsed from the time when the
earliest Aryans left their home on the shores of the central Asian Sea to the
time of the Greeks and Romans, bore witness to the rise and fall of innumerable