“‘O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children!... There is not an opinion, not a tradition of knowledge among you that is old.... You know nothing of that noble race of heroes of whom you are a remnant.... Nine thousand years, as our annals record, have elapsed since what I am about to tell you.... The most famous of your actions was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis, which lay over against the Pillars of Hercules, was greater than Libya and Asia put together and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean whereof the Mediterranean Sea was but a harbour; and within the Pillars the empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt and Greece and all the Mediterranean countries. Then your city did bravely and won renown throughout the earth. For, risking her own existence, she repelled the invader and gave liberty to all the nations within the Pillars. Soon after, earthquakes arose and floods; and your warlike race was swallowed up by the earth; and the island of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea.’” This page in the _Timæus_ is the first glimpse that history properly so-called affords of the immense chaos of the antediluvian period. Modern researches and discoveries have confirmed it step by step. To quote Roisel, who devoted a remarkable book to the Atlanteans, a work less well-known than those of Scott Elliott and Rudolf Steiner, but one that does not admit of the slightest doubt: “It is proved that, long before the historic ages, the Atlanticans had acquired a marvellous science whose elements mankind is hardly beginning to reconstitute and whose mighty relics are found in ancient Gaul, Egypt, Persia, India and the central portion of the American continent. More than ten thousand years before our era, they knew the precession of the equinoxes, the slow changes which many stars experience in their courses and the thousand secrets of nature. They had processes of which modern industry has not yet fathomed the mysteries.” 9 The outcome of these studies is that humanity never underwent a disaster to be compared with the disappearance of Atlantis. It will perhaps need thousands of years to repair that loss and to reascend to the level of a civilization which had certainties of which we laboriously glean the scattered remnants, regarding the origin and movements of the universe, the energy of matter, the unknown forces of this and other worlds, the life beyond the grave and a social organization and political economy similar to those of the bees. Nothing could better prove the uselessness of man’s effort than this unparalleled loss, if we did not strive to hope in spite of all.