bit by bit with watchful and attentive care, in the course of an
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
civilisation 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 civilisation 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
listeners I am now addressing, that result could hardly be
accomplished by further recommendations of mi