Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/495

Rh glaciers, flowing rivers, and falling cascades are the direct offspring of solar heat. All our machinery, therefore, whether driven by the windmill or the water-wheel, by horse-power or by steam—all the results of electrical and electro-magnetic changes—our telegraphs, our clocks, and our watches, all are wound up primarily by the sun.

The sun is the great source of energy in almost all terrestrial phenomena. From the meteorological to the geographical from the geological to the biological, in the expenditure and conversion of molecular movements, derived from the sun's rays, must be sought the motive power of all this infinitely varied phantasmagoria."

But the people of Atlantis had gone farther; they believed that the soul of man was immortal, and that he would live again in his material body; in other words, they believed in "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." They accordingly embalmed their dead.

The Duke of Argyll ("The Unity of Nature") says:

"We have found in the most ancient records of the Aryan language proof that the indications of religious thought are higher, simpler, and purer as we go back in time, until at last, in the very oldest compositions of human speech which have come down to us, we find the Divine Being spoken of in the sublime language which forms the opening of the Lord's Prayer. The date in absolute chronology of the oldest Vedic literature does not seem to be known. Professor Max Müller, however, considers that it may possibly take us back 5000 years.… All we can see with certainty is that the earliest inventions of mankind are the most wonderful that the race has ever made.… The first use of fire, and the discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of wild animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were first developed out of some wild grasses—these are all discoveries with which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare. They are all unknown to history—all lost in the light of an effulgent dawn."

The Atlanteans possessed an established order of priests; their religious worship was pure and simple. They lived under