Many other startling statements are made in this legend. For instance, it is said that the civilizations of the Incas in Peru and the Mayas in Central America, like the civilization of Egypt, were derived from Atlantis through immigration; that the Atlanteans were the first manufacturers of iron, and that the implements of the “Bronze Age” in Europe were derived from them; that the Phoenician alphabet, parents of all European alphabets, was derived from Atlantis, bearing a startling resemblance to the alphabet of the vanished race of the Mayas in Central America, whose ancient cities are just this very day, as you can read in your papers, being unearthed; that the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindus and the Scandinavians were merely the kings and queens and heroes of Atlantis, about whose real historic actions the migrating Atlanteans remembered stories which eventually went to create the mythology of their descendants. There is much else of this sort, all culminating in the great outstanding feature of the legend which is that Atlantis was destroyed in a terrible convulsion of nature, and sank beneath the ocean with almost all its inhabitants, leaving only a few of the loftiest peaks sticking above the water, which today comprise the islands of Madeira, the Azores and the Bermudas. From this cataclysm a few Atlanteans, it is related, escaped to neighboring shores in rafts and ships, bearing their tale of horror. And from these tales arose the legend of a great Flood or Deluge, which has survived to our own time in the Book of Genesis in the Bible and in the mythologies of all peoples of both the Old and the New Worlds. This is the legend, then, and that for thousands of years it was regarded as a fable proves nothing. People used to believe the legends of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were myths. They believed so for a thousand years, before archaeologists exposed the ruins. The historian Herodotus was called “the father of liars” for a thousand years, because he wrote of the wonders of the ancient civilizations of the Nile valley and of Chaldea. But now it is known he spoke the truth. It is so with this legend of Atlantis, of which the great Greek, Plato, has left us the most detailed account. All these thousands of years since Plato wrote his account of Atlantis, 400 years before the Birth of Christ, he has been regarded as a poetizer. But in the light of recent researches, which really are just beginning, it appears as if what he wrote was not legend but history, and as if, indeed, his story is one of the most valuable documents which have come down to us from antiquity.