l living race of men but
"belonged to astronomical mythology," was a "Man submerged in celestial
waters." If the legend of the lost Atlantis is only "like those of
Airyana-Vaejo and Jambu-dvipa," it is terrestrial enough, and therefore
"the mythological origin of the Deluge legend" is so far an open
question. We claim that it is not "indubitably demonstrated," however
clever the theoretical demonstration.
---------

Such are the criticisms passed, such the "historical difficulty." The
culprits arraigned are fully alive to their perilous situation;
nevertheless, they maintain the statement. The only thing which may
perhaps here be objected to is, that the names of the two nations are
incorrectly used. It may be argued that to refer to the remote
ancestors and their descendants equally as "Greeks and Romans," is an
anachronism as marked as would be the calling of the ancient Keltic
Gauls, or the Insubres, Frenchmen. As a matter of fact this is true.
But, besides the very plausible excuse that the names used were embodied
in a private letter, written as usual in great haste, and which was
hardly worthy of the honour of being quoted verbatim with all its
imperfections, there may perhaps exist still weightier objections to
calling the said people by any other name. One misnomer is as good as
another; and to refer to old Greeks and Romans in a private letter as
the old Hellenes from Hellas or Magna Graecia, and the Latins as from
Latium, would have been, besides looking pedantic, just as incorrect as
the use of the appellation noted, though it may have sounded, perchance,
more "historical." The truth is that, like the ancestors of nearly all
the Indo-Europeans (or shall we say Indo-Germanic Japhetidae?), the
Greek and Roman sub-races mentioned have to be traced much farther back.
Their origin must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric"
period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such
a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal
depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the
mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice.
The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the
Autochthones--a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any
people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and which, at any rate with the
Hellenes, meant certainly more than simply "soil-born," or primitive
aborigines; and yet the so-