Atlantis

Atlantis, according to ancient myth or tradition, the name of a vast island in the Atlantic Ocean. It is first mentioned by Plato in the Timæus and the Kritias. An Egyptian priest is said to have told Solon of its existence, lying off the Pillars of Hercules in the ocean, and larger than Libya and Asia Minor together. In consequence of an earthquake, it is said to have been engulfed by the waves, nine thousand years before his time, at the close of a long contest which its inhabitants maintained against the Athenians. Plato says that shoals of sand marked the site of the submerged island. Some have thought that the Canary Isles are the remains of this sunken island. Bircherod, in his treatise De Orbe Novo non Novo (Altdorf, 1685), maintained that Phœnician or Carthaginian trading ships driven by storm had reached the American coast; and had returned thence bringing with them marvellous tales of the New World, which proved the basis of the widespread belief in Atlantis. It is remarkable that recent palæontological researches should have established the fact of there having really existed an Atlantis in Tertiary times. The Tertiary shells of the United States are identical with a whole series of fossils in the same beds of France. Also the Tertiary vertebrate animals in France have their analogues either in fossil creatures or in living species in America. On this account geologists are justified in concluding that in the Tertiary epoch a land connection existed between the two continents. The fossil flora of the two continents gives like results. Finally, Collomb and Verneuil have collected evidence to show that there actually did exist an enormous island to the west of Spain, whose rivers formed the vast marshy and delta deposits of the Tertiary period in Spain. This is, however, a pure coincidence. It is impossible to suppose any tradition existing of such an island or land. It must be remembered that the whole Celtic family held to a belief in the Land of the Dead being situated beyond the Western Sea, which they called Glasinnis, or Avalon, and of which they told wondrous tales. Such stories may have reached the Greeks, and indeed we know they did, and were taken up by them and adopted into their mythology. They called this imaginary land in the ocean the Gardens of the Hesperides, or Isles of the Blessed. There can be little doubt that Plato's Atlantis is but another name for the same imaginary land, which is also spoken of on hearsay by Pliny, Diodorus, and Arnobius. In Lucian's masterpiece of wit and satire, the True History, the first place reached by the travellers is an island eighty days' sail westwards of the Pillars of Hercules. The New Atlantis of Bacon's imagination was an austral rather than a western continent, and the curious might recognise in it the modern Australia. The first stage in the journey to Campanella's 'City of the Sun' was a great southern continent, but the want of exploration under the Antarctic circle has left this still a mere imagination. See ANTILLES, AVALON, BRENDAN.