I SAW IN THE NIGHT MANY SPIRITS DESCEND, WHICH WERE TO WORK THE APPOINTED WORD.

Again from ocean's buried realms they rise,
Drowsy with their long sleep, the unshrived dead,
To speak with their thin voices of the Past
That lies beyond tradition.
Now we see

In fancy's thoughts the land before the Flood:
Again they stand, the battlements and towers
Against the azure skies:
Again those Atlantean temples rise,
And thronging pathways crown the heaving waves:
The voices of the Past speak yet again;
In dreams we hear them and we see the crowds
That dared the doom of vengeance. B-M.

There were giants in the earth in those days;
and also after that,
when the sons of God came in unto
the daughters of men,
and they bare children to them,
the same became mighty men which were of old,
men of renown." Genesis 6:4

All very ancient legend and the most rudimentary history, the vague allusions of Plato, Aristotle and Seneca, speak of a country in the Western Ocean, which would scarcely be likely to be the distant Americas; and I think we may accept those legends as to a land existing in what is now the Atlantic Ocean at about the period discussed, remembering that after all legend is oral history and starts with some foundations. This land, stretching from Florida, probably included above-sea portions of Europe and of Africa, the latter supposed to be the birth-place of the Adamites.

All theories as to what was land and what was water at those remote epochs must be more or less suppositious, and as geological results are not at all analogous we cannot say for certain what has been, and we may remember Darwin's words:

"I look upon the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating to only two or three countries, of this volume only a short chapter here and there has been preserved, and of each page only here and there a few lines."