Hayat Ali

THE HISTORY OF ATLANTIS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTORY A HISTORY OF ATLANTIS must differ from all other histories, for the fundamental reason that it seeks to record the chronicles of a country the soil which is no longer available for examination to the archeologists. If, through some violent of nature, the Italian peninsula had been sub merged in the green waters of Mediterranean at a period upcoming to the fall of Rome, we would still have been in the possession of much documentary evidence concerning the growth and ascent of the Roman Empire. At the same time the soil upon which that empire flourished, the ponderable remains of its civilization and its architecture, would have been continually lost to us save as regards their colonial manifestations. We should in a great measure have been forced to glean our ideas of Latin pre-eminence from those institutions which it founded in other lands, and from those traditions of it which remained at the era of disappearance among the unlettered nations surrounding it. But great as would be the difficulties attending such as enterprise these would indeed be negligible when compared with the tasks of groping to the cloud of the ages in quest of the outlines of chronicle and event which tell of a progress.