Josephus tells us that “The patriarch Seth, in order that wisdom and astronomical knowledge should not perish, erected, in prevision of the double destruction by fire and water predicted by Adam, two columns, one of brick, the other of stone, on which this knowledge was engraved, and which existed in the Siriadic country.”

In the Chaldean legends the god Ea ordered Khasisatra to inscribe the divine learning, and the principles of all sciences, on tables of terra-cotta, and bury them, before the Deluge, “in the City of the Sun at Sippara.”

Berosus, in his version of the Chaldean flood, says: 

“The deity, Chronos, appeared to him (Xisuthros) in a vision, and warned him that, upon the 15th day of the month Doesius, there would be a flood by which mankind would be destroyed.  He therefore enjoined him to write a history of the beginning, procedure, and conclusion of all things, and to bury it in the City of the Sun at Sippara, and to build a vessel,” etc.

The Hindoo Bhagavata-Purana tells us that the fish-god, who warned Satyravata of the coming of the Flood, directed him to place the sacred Scriptures in a safe place, “in order to preserve them from Hayagriva, a marine horse dwelling in the abyss.”

Are we to find the original of these legends in the following passage from Plato’s history of Atlantis?

“Now, the relations of their governments to one another were regulated by the injunctions of Poseidon, as the law had handed them down.  These were inscribed by the first then on a column of orichalcum, which was situated in the middle of the island, at the Temple of Poseidon, whither the people were gathered together. . . .  They received and gave judgments, and at daybreak they wrote down their sentences on a golden tablet, and deposited them as memorials with their robes.  There were many special laws which the several kings had inscribed about the temples.” (Critias, p. 120.)

A Succession of Disasters.—­The Central American books, translated by De Bourbourg, state that originally a part of the American continent extended far into the Atlantic Ocean.  This tradition is strikingly confirmed by the explorations of the ship Challenger, which show that the “Dolphin’s Ridge” was connected with the shore of South America north of the mouth of the Amazon.  The Central American books tell us that this region of the continent was destroyed by a succession of frightful convulsions, probably at long intervals apart; three of these catastrophes are constantly mentioned, and sometimes there is reference to one or two more.

“The land,” in these convulsions, “was shaken by frightful earthquakes, and the waves of the sea combined with volcanic fires to overwhelm and ingulf it. . . .  Each convulsion swept away portions of the land until the whole disappeared, leaving the line of coast as it now is.  Most of the inhabitants, overtaken amid their regular employments, were destroyed; but some escaped in ships, and some fled for safety to the summits of high mountains, or to portions of the land which for a time escaped immediate destruction.” (Baldwin’s “Ancient America,” p. 176.)