em Atlantean, from their evident origin not
far from Atlas, and their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We
can find traces of no other race which at all closely fulfills the
necessary conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under which
we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments, or of the
long established and universally extended spiritual conditions which
make possible such vast ideal enterprises.

In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find the
conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still find a
lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we hardly find
a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the lands which have
no cromlechs or standing stones.

We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh, four
miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still living or of
their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of peat, which had
evidently formed there after their erection. We have here a natural
chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat forms, and we can,
therefore, assign a certain age to a given depth. We have given one mode
of reckoning already; we find it corroborated by another. In the Somme
valley, in northern France, we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat,
at different levels, are relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age
which preceded it; and, far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our
Atlanteans, who preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we
know accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a
thousand years.

On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the growth is likely to be
slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the same rate, a foot a
thousand years, and we shall have, for this great stone circle, an
antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at least. This assumes that
the peat began to form as soon as the monument was completed; but the
contrary may be the case; centuries may have intervened.

We may, however, take this as a provisional date, and say that our
cromlech epoch, the epoch of the Atlantean builders, from Algeria to
Ireland, from Ireland to the Baltic, is ten or twelve thousand years
ago; extending, perhaps, much further back in the past, and in certain
regions coming much further down towards the