reference to the great record preserved in the land of the Deluge? Were
not the pyramids of Egypt and America imitations of similar structures
in Atlantis? Might not the building of such a gigantic edifice have
given rise to the legends existing on both continents in regard to a
Tower of Babel?

How did the human mind hit upon this singular edifice--the pyramid? By
what process of development did it reach it? Why should these
extraordinary structures crop out on the banks of the Nile, and amid the
forests and plains of America? And why, in both countries, should they
stand with their sides square to the four cardinal points of the
compass? Are they in this, too, a reminiscence of the Cross, and of the
four rivers of Atlantis that ran to the north, south, east, and west?

"There is yet a third combination that demands a specific notice. The
decussated symbol is not unfrequently planted upon what Christian
archaeologists designate 'a calvary,' that is, upon a mount or a cone.
Thus it is represented in both hemispheres. The megalithic structure of
Callernish, in the island of Lewis before mentioned, is the most perfect
example of the practice extant in Europe. The mount is preserved to this
day. This, to be brief, was the recognized conventional mode of
expressing a particular primitive truth or mystery from the days of the
Chaldeans to those of the Gnostics, or from one extremity of the
civilized world to the other. It is seen in the treatment of the ash
Yggdrasill of the Scandinavians, as well as in that of the Bo-tree of
the Buddhists. The prototype was not the Egyptian, but the Babylonian
crux ansata, the lower member of which constitutes a conical support for
the oval or sphere above it. With the Gnostics, who occupied the
debatable ground between primitive Christianity and philosophic
paganism, and who inscribed it upon their tombs, the cone symbolized