---------- * The position recently taken up by Mr. Gerald Massey in Light that the story of Atlantis is not a geological event but an ancient astronomical myth, is rather imprudent. Mr. Massey, notwithstanding his rare intuitional faculties and great learning, is one of those writers in whom the intensity of research bent into one direction has biased his otherwise clear understanding. Because Hercules is now a constellation it does not follow that there never was a hero of this name. Because the Noachian Universal Deluge is now proved a fiction based upon geological and geographical ignorance, it does not, therefore, appear that there were not many local deluges in prehistoric ages. The ancients connected every terrestrial event with the celestial bodies. They traced the history of their great deified heroes and memorialized it in stellar configurations as often as they personified pure myths, anthropomorphizing objects in Nature. One has to learn the difference between the two modes before attempting to classify them under one nomenclature. An earthquake has just engulfed over 80,000 people (87,903) in Sunda Straits. These were mostly Malays, savages with whom but few had relations, and the dire event will be soon forgotten. Had a portion of Great Britain been thus swept away instead, the whole world would have been in commotion, and yet, a few thousand years hence, even such an event would have passed out of man's memory; and a future Gerald Massey might be found speculating upon the astronomical character and signification of the Isles of Wight, Jersey, or Man, arguing, perhaps, that this latter island had not contained a real living race of men but "belonged to astronomical mythology," was a "Man submerged in celestial waters." If the legend of the lost Atlantis is only "like those of Airyana-Vaejo and Jambu-dvipa," it is terrestrial enough, and therefore "the mythological origin of the Deluge legend" is so far an open question. We claim that it is not "indubitably demonstrated," however clever the theoretical demonstration. ---------