270 THE NATURALIST IN NICARAGUA. [Ch. XIV. 



in, but proudly looking across wide plains peopled by 

 their worshippers, who from their villages and fields 

 behold the gods they adore, and implore their protec- 

 tion and support. 







Was the fabled Atlantis really a myth, or was it not 

 that great continent in the Atlantic laid bare by the 

 lowering of the ocean, on which the present West Indian 

 islands were mountains, rising high above the level and 

 fertile plains which are now covered by the sea. Ob- 

 scurely the accounts of it have come down to us from the 

 dim past, but there is a remarkable coincidence between 

 the traditions that have been handed down on the two 

 sides of the Atlantic. 



In a fragment of the works of Theopompus, who lived 

 in the fourth century before the Christian era, he gives 

 an account of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, 

 the king of Phrygia, in which the former tells the king 

 that Europe, Asia, and Africa were surrounded by the 

 sea, but that beyond them was an island of immense size, 

 in which were many great cities, and nations with laws 

 and customs very different from theirs. Plato, in his 

 " Timoeus and Critias," relates that Solon was told by a 

 priest of Sais, from the sacred inscription in the temple, 

 how Solon's country " once opposed a power which with 

 great arrogance pushed its way into Europe and Asia 

 from the Atlantic ocean." " Beyond the entrance which 

 you call the Pillars of Hercules there was an island 

 larger than Libya and Asia together. From it naviga- 

 tion passed to the other islands, and from them to the 

 opposite continent which surrounded that ocean. On 

 this great Atlantic island there was a powerful and 



