And we find this succession of great destructions of the Atlantic continent in the triads of Wales, where traditions are preserved of "three terrible catastrophes." We are told by the explorations of the ship Challenger that the higher lands reach in the direction of the British Islands; and the Celts had traditions that a part of their country once extended far out into the Atlantic, and was subsequently destroyed. And the same succession of destructions is referred to in the Greek legends, where a deluge of Ogyges--"the most ancient of the kings of Boeotia or Attica, a quite mythical person, lost in the night of ages"--preceded that of Deucalion. We will find hereafter the most ancient hymns of the Aryans praying God to hold the land firm. The people of Atlantis, having seen their country thus destroyed, section by section, and judging that their own time must inevitably come, must have lived under a great and perpetual terror, which will go far to explain the origin of primeval religion, and the hold which it took upon the minds of men; and this condition of things may furnish us a solution of the legends which have come down to us of their efforts to perpetuate their learning on pillars, and also an explanation of that other legend of the Tower of Babel, which, as I will show hereafter, was common to both continents, and in which they sought to build a tower high enough to escape the Deluge. All the legends of the preservation of a record prove that the united voice of antiquity taught that the antediluvians had advanced so far in civilization as to possess an alphabet and a system of writing; a conclusion which, as we will see hereafter, finds confirmation in the original identity of the alphabetical signs used in the old world and the new. PART III THE CIVILIZATION OF THE OLD WORLD AND NEW COMPARED. CHAPTER I. CIVILIZATION AN INHERITANCE. Material civilization might be defined to be the result of a series of inventions and discoveries, whereby man improves his condition, and controls the forces of nature for his own advantage.