MYSTERIES STILL UNSOLVED.

Lake County Press, Issue 2116, 3 May 1906, Page 2

MYSTERIES STILL UNSOLVED.

LOST COUNTRIKS AND LUST RACES. The public appetite craves nothing so much as a riddle, a secret to guess, but nowadays every man's life is so bare, and we live so much out of doors that very few facts or fancies can be kept hidden. There was, however, certain mysteries which during the last century the public pondered and worn si over, which are yet unsolved, an«l^except,.-.. by a few old people, arc almost for- - gotten. One of these, perhaps the oldest, is the question whether beneath the Atlantic, not far from the Bahamas, there is a sunken continent, known to the Greeks as the lost Atlantis. It was still talked of familiarly in the first half of the last century. Seafaring men declared that when the water was calm and clear they had caught glimpses of ancient, cities beneath, with their glittering roofs and spires, and that ill certain conditions of the atmosphere the tolling of the bells could be distinctly heard. The lost colony is now known only as the subject of an ancient fable. But sixty years ago it was, to most educated people, believed to be an actual fact. Another much-discussed mystery then was what had become of the colony of civilized people who at the time of the settlement of America lived on the western coast of Greenland. They were well known to tho early Banish navigators, who madefrequent mention of them in their logs and reports. Tradition among the Laplanders reports that the whole colony two centuries ago emigrated in a body to the eastern coast of Greenland, attempting to cross the hitherto impenetrable masses of ice in the centre. No tidings ever have came back from them. Jt was supposed by the Danish missionaries that they had perished in the ranges of the ice mountains, but : . among the Laplanders tharc were traditions that they had safely reached the coast and settled there, now forming a civilized community, whol- • ly isolated from the rest of the world. One of Nansen's voyages was, in fact, directed to that coast in the hope of finding that colony. Another problem which perplexed the last generation of Americans was the long-extinct pigmy race which centuries ago undoubtedly inhabited the Tennessee mountains. Legends arnong the Indians told of such a tribe of dwarfs, who were supposed to be of more intelligence than the red men. But these legends were very hazy. A burying-ground, however, actually was discovered in the early part of the last century, in which all the. skeletons were of pigmy proportions. Some of these were carried away to college museums. But no scientific inquiry has ever been directed to