“The pillars of heaven were broken; the earth shook to its very foundations; the heavens sunk lower toward the north; the sun, the moon, and the stars changed their motions; the earth fell to pieces, and the waters enclosed within its bosom burst forth with violence and overflowed it.  Man having rebelled against Heaven, the system of the universe was totally disordered.  The sun was eclipsed, the planets altered their course, and the grand harmony of nature was disturbed.”

A learned Frenchman, M. Terrien de la Couperie, member of the Asiatic Society of Paris, has just published a work (1880) in which he demonstrates the astonishing fact that the Chinese language is clearly related to the Chaldean, and that both the Chinese characters and the cuneiform alphabet are degenerate descendants of an original hieroglyphical alphabet.  The same signs exist for many words, while numerous words are very much alike.  M. de la Couperie gives a table of some of these similarities, from which I quote as follows: 

+------------+----------+----------+
| English.   | Chinese. | Chaldee. |
+------------+----------+----------+
| To shine   | Mut      | Mul.     |
+------------+----------+----------+
| To die     | Mut      | Mit.     |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Book       | King     | Kin.     |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Cloth      | Sik      | Sik.     |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Right hand | Dzek     | Zag.     |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Hero       | Tan      | Dun.     |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Earth      | Kien-kai | Kiengi.  |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Cow        | Lub      | Lu, lup. |
+------------+----------+----------+
| Brick      | Ku       | Ku.      |
+------------+----------+----------+

This surprising discovery brings the Chinese civilization still nearer to the Mediterranean head-quarters of the races, and increases the probability that the arts of China were of Atlantean origin; and that the name of Nai Hoang-ti, or Nai Korti, the founder of Chinese civilization, may be a reminiscence of Nakhunta, the chief of the gods, as recorded in the Susian texts, and this, in turn, a recollection of the Deva-Nahusha of the Hindoos, the Dionysos of the Greeks, the king of Atlantis, whose great empire reached to the “farther parts of India,” and embraced, according to Plato, “parts of the continent of America.”

Linguistic science achieved a great discovery when it established the fact that there was a continuous belt of languages from Iceland to Ceylon which were the variant forms of one mother-tongue, the Indo-European; but it must prepare itself for a still wider generalization.  There is abundant proof—­proof with which pages might be filled—­that there was a still older mother-tongue, from which Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic were all derived—­the language of Noah, the language of Atlantis, the language of the great “aggressive empire” of Plato, the language of the empire of the Titans.