Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1890-04-06
A LOST CONTINENT.
The Bottom of the Pacific Once 0c-
cupied by a Great People.
RELICS FOUND ON THE ISLANDS.
Vast Terraces of Stone Fitted With the
Skill of the Pyramids.
WONDERFUL COLUMNS AND STATUES
WRITTEN FOR THE DISPATCH.

WONDERFUL COLUMNS AND STATUES
| WRITTEN FOR THE DISPATCH.
Two sages, Plato, of Athens, and Don
nelly, of Minneapolis, have made Atlantis &
household word. Even children can plot it,
metes and bounds where now the restless
ocean rolls and takes its name from the con.
tinent it has drowned. Their elders speak
Of the lost civilization whose ruins now lie
upon the sea bed thickly crusted with dull
crystals of salt and the strange growths ol
the dark depths In the lost Atlantis which
Plato taught and which his latest follower
has restored instinct with life, they find
solution for every mystery that stares upon
them from four continents, Europe, Africa
and the two Americas.
But who can off-hand draw the lines Of
Lemuria? 1t is just as much continent as
the famed Atlantis, but who knows its
former place upon the globe? 1t is too
sunken beneath the all-devouring waves OF
ocean, but its spires yet tower here and
there by hundreds above the sea to show
where it once was. But who can lay his
| fingers on the instructive ball and turn
its proper part to view and say that here
Lemuria lay ages ago when Atlantis
raised its shores from other waves. The two
| lost continents are theories of the sage,
dim fgments of ancient tradition handed
down from the fathers none know how.
One rests upon a base as solid as the other,
but there the likeness ends. Atlantis is a
name familiar on the lips of all; Lemuria
rarely strikes the eye save of some book
worm grubbing in dusty folios OF recondite
story.
THE BOTTOM OF THE PACIFIC.
Lemuria is the drowned continent of the
Pacific as Atlantis is of the other sea. The
map may be made to show its former lines.
Between the two tropics and stretching west
ward from the one hundred and twentieth
west meridian the chart will show the Pacific
dotted with islands, small at first, but grow
ing larger toward the west until the several
chains sweep together in a compact archi-
pelago crowding through the narrow Malay
seas and spreading out upon the Indian
Ocean in scattered groups again. Around
these islands draw a bounding line, and
there Lemuria is marked to sight, and con-
troversialists will battle long upon every
group included as is their wont to fight their
hardest battles over points that solved one
way or the other can have no possible bear
ing on anything at all. Thus, this poor,
forgotten continent has been fished up from
the depths only to be sunk again under the
load of theories laid upon it to account for
myriad vexing facts which puzzle students
of the island world.
These are some culled at random from a
long list OF others. With peoples of differ
ent race and speech widely separated by
leagues of barren sea, why should some half
a hundred words be the same, and those
the names Of simplest necessaries? Thus the
numerals stretch out across the sea with
scarce a change; water is wal wherever you
may chance to find it, and land, if not
benua pure and simple, is so close to it that
the change may pass for careless mispronun-
citation. And sky-at the eastern verge of
the Lemurian continent it is found as lani in
Hawaii; at the somthern edge 1t is rangi in
New Zealand, and so through langi in FIJI,
it reached langit in the Java seas, and grows
to lanihitra in distant Madagascar. But
how these words have travelled over many
thousand miles of trackless sea is question
for whose solution this continent has been
raised and sunk again.
HOME OF THEIR ANCESTORS.
Then, too, these people have uniform
tradition of whence they came and its name
frame it. Hawaiians Say their fathers came
from an older Hawaii lying in the remote
West; Samoan story points to an ancient
western Savaii, whose name their largest
island bears; Maori memory in New Zealand
recalls a voyage from Hawaiki; the scattered
threads meet in Java, where the name is
still the same, and at last the slender cord
stretches clear across the Indian Ocean to
the African Saba, where it hopelessly loses
itself in the ten lost tribes of Israel. Those
ten lost tribes forever vanished from the
page of history and yet forever trying to
appear here, there and small
wonder is it that instead of wrestling with
their problem the student deems it simpler
to drag the ocean bottom.
Word puzzles are not the only puzzles of
the islands of the South Seas. Faint and
battling traditions of ancient voyages, dim,
unsubstantial, are not the only trace of
distant ages which remain. The past has
come down to the present in enduring stone
but who first set those rock memorials in
place, how many ages they have watched
creeping across the sea, no man may say for
the memory of the builders has faded out
of everv human mind and the stone gives
no clew. Scattered here and there across
the sea these stone memorials may be found,
mysterious to the white man, mysterious to
the native VINO mas loSb the ART or working
stone if indeed he ever had it. The present
people of the islands could never have
faced huge blocks and cut their edges so
true that after all the lapse of unknown
ages the trysquare shows the work to have
been done by skillful masons. These then
are not che men who swung block on block
into massy walls, each block weighing
many tons.
SOME MARVELLOUS REMAINS.
In the Tubuai or Austral group lying to
the south of Tahiti is the island of Rapa It'll,
'little" Rapa, horseshoe of steep mountains
embracing a tiny bay. Here hill shows
rising terraces of stone one above the other,
there another hill is banked with stone that
upholds stone tagged path winding in
spiral to the summit where is built solid
platform of huge rocks. Across valley
between the hills is thrown a broad cause
wav. So on hill and hill the stone is found
dressed to shape and the people of the
island simply say "they were there when
our fathers came here, they must have been |
there since the beginning of the world.'
The stones are blocks Of the very hardest |
rock, the smallest full 10 feet in length by |
and 4 upon the smaller end. These have |
been dressed to so true surface that they |
rest in place without bit of mortar and yet |
the seam remains SO close that one could not |
even slip sheet of paper in between the |
stones. When these terraces are of less ex- |