Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1881-09-22
Atlantis.


Something has been said recently, in our
State papers about new book, written by Hon.
Ignatius Donnelly, of this State, ana now be-
ing published by Harper Brothers, OF New
York, bearing the above title. AS. Mr.. Don
nelly is so well known to the people of the
Northwest, we have made some inquiries OF
him as to the nature and purposes OF this
book. We learn from him that the book in
question will comprise about 400 pages; that
it will contain more than 100 engravings, and
that it will make its appearance in three or
four weeks, nearly all of it being now in type.
It is likely to create something OF
sensation, not alone in Minnesota,
but throughout the whole country, from
the novelty of its views and the importance OF
the questions treated of, to both science and
religion.
There was an old Greek philosopher, who
lived about 400 years before the time of Christ,
named Plato, who told that his ancestor, the
great law-giver Of the Greeks, Scion, had
learned from the Egyptians that there once
existed in the days that were ancient even then,
in the Atlantic ocean, in front of the Straits of
Gibraltar, an immense island, thousand
miles wide, called Atlantis, which ruled over
the whole of The then known world from
Egypt to the shores "of the great opposite
continent" meaning America; that it was
the seat of great empire, inhabited by mil
lions of people; that these people became
greatly wicked, and that God to
punish them, brought upon them
great storms and earthquakes and
sunk the whole island in the ocean. This
story of Plato was for thousands of years re-
garded as myth, but recently the ships of
the different nations have been employed in
making deep sea soundings of the Atlantic
ocean, and these soundings reveal the surpris-
ing fact that just about where Plato located
the island of Atlantis there are the remains of
an immense submerged island, towering q
thousand fathoms above the bottom of the
sea, with its face wrought into valleys and
hills that could only have been made when
the island was above the ocean level. Then
came discoveries in zoology to show that the
animals that inhabited Europe during the
bronze age were identical with those now
found in the United States. Then came the
revelations of botany and demonstrated that
the plants of Europe during the
Miocene age are the same as those found
now in the United States. Mr.. Donnelly has
gathered together all these facts, and multi
tude of others, from different fields of re-
search, and his book is an attempt to prove
that Plato's story was literally true. He has
discovered that the precise forms of the most
ancient alphabets of Europe, the Phenician
and Egyptian, are found in the heart of the
hieroglyphy with which the monuments Of
Central America are covered. He goes further
and answers the charge of the geologlsts, that
the whole story of Noah's deluge was an i'm.
probable fiction, and that the globe was never
covered with water over the top of the highest
mountains, by showing, from a careful com.
parison of the deluge legends of the whole
world, that Atlantis was the Ante-dlluvan
world, and that it was the destruction of At
lantis which is described in Genesis.
These propositions are so startling that they
cannot fail to provoke great curiosity and
criticism, but Mr.. D. claims that he has 400
pages of facts to sustain them.
Mr. Donnelly showed US ssme of the proofs
of his book and the illustrations certainly re-
veal wonderful and unaccountable resem.
blance between the pyramids of Egypt and
the pyramids OF Mexico, between the orna
mentation of the buildings in India and Cen.
trail America, and between the tools, nipple
ments, ornaments, weapons, etc., found OF
both sides of the Atlantic.
If the scientific world conclude that Mr.. D
has established the truth of his theories thu
publication of his book will constitute an err
in American literature.