to Norway and some of the
Baltic Islands.

We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring evidence of
a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from the Pillars of
Hercules--eastward through Gibraltar Strait to sunny Algeria, to
southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles; and northward, along the
stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within sight of Africa almost to the
Arctic Circle, across Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the
lands of the Baltic and the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory
there must have been a common people, a common purpose and inspiration,
a common striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long
ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant
to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to ideal ends.
There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the
invisible world, and a large practical power over natural forces, before
these huge monuments could be erected. Some of the stones upheld in the
air in the Irish cromlechs weigh eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If
we estimate that a well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would
demand the simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is
at least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could
be applied.

We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest material reality to
see this great empire on the Atlantic and along the western
Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the cromlech-builders, as we may
call it, for want of a better name. As the thought and purpose of its
inhabitants are uniform throughout its whole vast extent, we are led to
see in them a single homogeneous race, working without rivals, without
obstacles, without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free
to choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have endured
throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does not look back
to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The spiritual sweep
and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore, as great as the extent
of their territory. This mysterious people must have had a life as
wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or Egypt, whose territories we find
them everywhere approaching, but nowhere invading.

What we now know of the past