  Dear Boys: One of the greatest, if not the greatest story of all the ages, is the legend of Atlantis. According to this legend, there existed at one time a great continent in the Atlantic Ocean not far west of the Pillars of Hercules, those two great rocks of Gibraltar in Spain and Jibel Kebir in Morocco which guard the entrance to the Mediterranean. The legend says that this continent was the first region in which man rose from barbarism to civilization, and that in the course of ages it became a populous and mighty nation from whose shores immigrants went out to settle the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the valley of the Mississippi, the valley of the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the shores of the Mediterranean, of the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian and the western coast of Europe and Africa. From this continent, continues the legend, the first colonists penetrated western Africa clear to Egypt where they took root in the Nile valley and developed what is today conceded to be the earliest known civilization. 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. Some day you must hunt up and read for yourselves a book entitled “Atlantis or the Antediluvian World.” Written by Ignatius Donnelly, it was published by Harper & Brothers in 1882. In it are collected Plato’s story of Atlantis and a wealth of evidences which go to prove, in the author’s opinion, that Atlantis did actually exist, that it was the home of the white race, the Semitic race and, perhaps, the Turanian, and that it was destroyed by a convulsion of Nature. Since Donnelly’s book, investigation has gone further. Savants uncovered near the southern edge of the Sahara Desert about the time of the outbreak of the Great War the ruins of two great cities of an unknown civilization, believed to have been seats of a migration from Atlantis. The war, however, halted their research, and up to a recent period the investigation had not been resumed. In one of these cities, people of an unknown white strain resided in a semi-savage state. I, therefore, have made them the background for this story, and that you will like it is the hope of THE AUTHOR.
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