Chapter IX.
THE ANTIQUITY OF SOME OF OUR GREAT INVENTIONS.
It may seem like a flight of the imagination to suppose that the mariner's compass was known to the inhabitants of Atlantis. And yet, if my readers are satisfied that the Atlanteans were a highly civilized maritime people, carrying on commerce with regions as far apart as Peru and Syria, we must conclude that they possessed some means of tracing their course in the great seas they traversed; and accordingly, when we proceed to investigate this subject, we find that as far back as we may go in the study of the ancient races of the world, we find them possessed of a knowledge of the virtues of the magnetic stone, and in the habit of utilizing it. The people of Europe, rising a few centuries since out of a state of semi-barbarism, have been in the habit of claiming the invention of many things which they simply borrowed from the older nations. This was the case with the mariner's compass. It was believed for many years that it was first invented by an Italian named Amalfi, A.D. 1302. In that interesting work, Goodrich's "Life of Columbus," we find a curious history of the magnetic compass prior to that time, from which we collate the following points:
"In A.D. 868 it was employed by the Northmen." ("The Landnamabok," vol. i., chap. 2.) An Italian poem of A.D. 1190 refers to it as in use among the Italian sailors at that date. In the ancient language of the Hindoos, the Sanscrit—which has been a dead language for twenty-two hundred years—the
