HISTORY is a narrative of public events at any given epoch, and necessarily is not an exact science. When the record is complete, consistent with acknowledged facts and undisputed, we call it Authentic, and when not so accredited, Apocryphal. It occasionally becomes transitory-that is to say, studied as time passes—in the light of new discoveries, particular incidents cease to be authentic, either in themselves or in their relations, becoming not unfrequently dislocated, and, like the pieces of glass in a kaleidescope, arrange themselves in new and unforeseen combinations, changing place with other and older. events, sometimes losing, never gaining importance by the movement. Some of the best attested historical facts turn out veritable fables and closely pursued, their metamorphoses resemble the shadows which chase each other over mountain tops, and are lost to view as daylight ap

proaches. The Americans are bolder than other nations in their jettison of such deck load and lumber, albeit they "came over in the Mayflower," or were landed at Jamestown.

Early American history is at this moment especially disturbed. There is, in fact, less certainty about it now than at any former period. The reason is as curious as it is unsatisfactory. It is because now, four hundred years since Columbus, we find we know more of geography and history than either he or his predecessors for a thousand years. He probably knew of the voyages of which we are to write, and honestly believed the islands he encountered on his way to Asia a new world; but it is impossible he could have died, as is still thought and taught, with the impression that Cuba and Japan were the same countries. This continent was supposed to have risen from the ocean, on the breast of some mighty and recent

convulsion. Springing from mysterious depths into visible life like the fabled Roman goddess—but with several feet deep of vegetable loam upon its surface, it seemed the latest and most wonderful achievement of the exhaustless energies of creative nature, the fair and beauteous virgin bride of earth's maturer longings, and the destined theater of man's nobler life and sublimer destinies.

But, piercing the mysterious silence of unrecorded time, amidst the trackless forests of Central America, there were exhumed deserted cities in Yucatan, with treasures of painting, sculpture and wonderful architecture, arsenals and weapons of war, implements of husbandry and the chase, literary works, the relics of an unknown people who, in those once favored regions, possessed for centuries a civilization older and more perfect than the Ptolemies. And then, to shock the romantic dreams of our ancestors and shame their easy credulity, came the discovery in the woods of North America of great mounds and earthworks resembling those of Britain, stretched across the Mississippi Valley east from the Great River to the sea, and on the other side, entrenchments projected from the mouth of the Rio Grande to its source in some lone canyon of the Pacific coast, wrapped by the Sierras in lofty gloom and dipping lines of beauty and grandeur down to the western horizon.

On both sides of the Mississippi

the earth teems with evidences of an armed and bitter struggle between civilized populations in the south and vast hordes of northern Asiatics continued for generations, wherein millions of men participated and perished, and of which they are the sole relics and were the only witnesses. Our forefathers peopled the unknown seas with great monsters, but they were of mortal birth. The barriers we have to encounter are celestial as the angels-the fallen angels-in their immortality, and more invincible in their stubbornness. Not a few are yet to be found who begin American history with the voyage of Columbus. Some even doubt the Sagas and Norse voyages. While these heavy-shod antiquaries are vainly striving to keep step with modern progress, we affirm the following propositions as covering the present condition of American Archæological Science and its result, viz.:

1. The legend of Atlantis is not a fable, the former existence of that country being attested by evidence equally satisfactory with the proof of the lake dwellers. America is not "The New World," but the oldest of the continents.

2. In no sense can Columbus be said to have been “the Discoverer of America," his voyage having been preceded by many others at intervals in three hundred years, beginning in A. D. 545- When these navigators came here they found this continent peopled by colonies and tribes

from Asia, who finally obtained possession of the entire North American continent.

3. The Irish, under Brandon, a. D. 545, were the first to introduce European civilization and to make the first European settlements. Entering the Mississippi from the Gulf, and ascending that stream, as we shall show, to its junction with the Ohio, they occupied the banks of these rivers seven years. Brandon was followed by Ernulphus and Buo, two Irish monks, with their associates in 827, and afterwards by Madoc of Wales in 1170. Their settlements extended as far as Carolina and Florida. The region from the Ohio to the Gulf and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic was generally called and known as Hwtra-mannaland or White Man's Land, and Ireland edh Miklah, or "Ireland the Greater." The Norse voyages and explorations were confined to the New England coast. The object of this paper is to establish these propositions by unquestionable authority.

I. THE ISLAND OF ATLANTIS. In view of the result of the recent deep-sea soundings prosecuted by the United States and other governments in the Atlantic, it is not easy to comprehend the incredulity with. which any account of the lost Atlantis was formerly received. But that, upon the space where now the Atlantic rolls in broad, unbroken billows, and great meadows of sea-weed mantle its restless bosom, between Amer

ica and Africa, only a few miles outside the pillars of Hercules, there formerly existed an island as large as Africa, with a great continent, none other than that now called North and South America, beyond it, and that this island and continent were known to the ancients, and was the seat of an Empire whose sway extended east over northern Africa and the Meditteranean to the Tyrrhenian Sea, and westwardly over North and South America to the islands of the Pacific, is proven by the same evidence as that upon which rests many of the most important discoveries of modern science. The tradition was known to Seneca and Aristotle, and was told by the priests of Psenophis, Sonitus, Heliopolis and Sais to Solon, B. C. 570 [Weise Discoveries America], when he was in Egypt. He communicated it to the father of Critias, who was the informant of Socrates. Plato committed it to writing in the Critias and Timæus. The catastrophe it described occurred nine thousand years before the days of Solon. After describing the great extent of the Atlantic, these priests added that "the Atlantic sea was at one time navigated, and had an island in the midst of it which fronted that mouth you call the Pillars of Hercules, larger than Libya and Asia Minor together. There was a passage thence for the travelers of that day to the rest of the islands, and from those islands to an opposite continent. What is within the mouth mentioned

(the Mediterranean) is only a bay with a narrow entrance; but that sea, the Atlantic, is indeed a true ocean, and the land which entirely surrounds it may truly and correctly be called at

continent."

"Until recently," says Mr. Short (in North Americans of Antiquity 142), "the mere expression of belief in the former existence of Atlantis has been the signal for criticism, and has called forth the smile of pity, if not contempt. Such, however, is no longer true, since successful scientific investigation, consisting chiefly of deep sea soundings, and the study of the fauna and flora of the opposite shores of the Atlantic, call for the respectful attention of all who are interested in the ancient history of this continent. Whether the Atlantidæ, who threatened to overthrow the earliest Greek and Egyptian states, but who were swallowed up by the sea upon the engulfment of their island, were the inhabitants of these ridges discovered in the ocean by the Dolphin and the Challenger must, for the present at least, remain in doubt, though strong probabilities point to the conclusion that they were." Ibid 505. Mr. Bradford (in American Antiquities 221) says: "In any event, after a fair and impartial examination of all these circumstances, it seems extremely difficult to regard the account of Plato as a fabrication. Its accordance with the ancient mythology and facts now well ascertained, and its allusion to a Western Conti

nent at that time generally known, oppose such a proposition. If it was the creation of the Greek or Egyptian imagination, surely fancy Lever formed a truer fiction, nor has modern discovery disclosed a more striking coincidence."

The truth is, that America, instead of being "a New World" presented by Columbus to Spain, as claimed in the pretentious inscription on his monument at Seville, and carved in marble by Persico at Washington, is the oldest of the continents.

"First born among them," says Agassiz (Historical Sketches, cited in Bryant's U. S. 12), "though so

un

much later in cultivation and civilization than some of more recent birth, America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the 'New World.' Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, and hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped. all the earth beside. While Europe was represented only by islands, rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an broken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West. When the tall summits of the Himalaya chain, the loftiest on the globe, had just begun to be discovered above the primeval ocean, and were still being rocked in the volcanic cradle of their infancy by the creative hand of physical nature, the Palisades of the Hudwere hoary with age." These stirring words of the great geologist

son

.

preceded for many years the grand discovery of the late Prof. E. Emmons -formerly of Albany, in this Statewhile geologist to the State of North Carolina. Among the sedimentary rocks of Montgomery county, in that State, he found those famous Paleatroches, which, in a letter to him I have seen, Sir Charles Lyell declares to be "the earliest evidence of organized life upon this planet, the forerunners of man and harbingers of that immortal faculty which connects him with celestial beings." And surely it was fitting that, close by Mecklenberg, in that good old North State where the cradle of the Republic was rocked by her statesmen, and the dust of her heroes and of empire commingle, the great New Yorker she employed should discover the earliest evidences of terrestrial life to be also entombed.

COLUMBUS NOT THE FIRST DISCOVERER.

Col. Barclay Kennon, formerly of the U. S. North Pacific Surveying Expedition, says (Short N. A. A., 509, note 2): "From the result of the most accurate scientific observations, it is evident that the voyage from China to America can be made without being out of sight of land more than a few hours at a time. There is, in fact, an almost unbroken chain connecting the Asiatic continent with the peninsula of Kamschatka. At the North Pacific all doubts vanish in the presence of the most favorable conditions for a migration from the one continent to the other.

"The weather in Berings Strait, though cold even in summer, is not nearly so cold as the winter of Japan. Sir Charles Lyell says Berings Strait happens to agree singularly with the Strait of Dover, the difference in depth being not more than three or four feet.

"With this statement before us," continues Mr. Short, "while standing on the deck of a vessel, midway between Calais and Dover, with the shores of England and France in full view, we felt as never before-how absurd is the opinion which has been advanced more than once, that no general migration was likely to have taken place across Bering Strait." Ib., 510. "It is then impossible to approximate the period of the world's history in which the migration must have taken place. No doubt it was in a remote age, before the old world people had developed their present or even historical peculiarities and types of civilization." Ib., 511.

Prof. Grote thinks the first migration took place "in the tertiary period of Pliocene time, and the subsequent advance of the ice period, cutting off all communication with the rest of the world until recent times, produced a modification of the race, and that man retired with the glacier on its return to the North, where we now see his descendants in the Eskimo." 512. Gallatin (in 1st Am. Ethnol. So. Trans., 158) says: "That America was first peopled by Asiatic tribes is highly probable, and after the lapse