210 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 2 



a fragment, as is also the case with the New Atlantis of Francis 

 Bacon. 



In the Atlantis of Plato we are told of a great island lying in 

 the Western Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It was inhabited 

 by the descendants of Poseidon, or Neptune, to whom Atlantis had 

 been given when the whole earth was divided out among the gods. 

 Plato gives a most detailed account of the form of the island, which 

 was circular and surrounded by two other zones of land separated 

 by zones of water. 



Termier says: 



We may smile in reading: the story of Neptune, but the geographic descrip- 

 tion of the ishiud is not of the sort one jokes about and forgets. The de- 

 scription tallies well with what we would imagine to-day of a great land 

 emerged in the region of the Azores, a land formed from a basement of ancient 

 rocks bearing, with some fragments of whitish calcareous terranes, extinct 

 volcanic mountains and lava flows, black or red, long since grown cold. 



The white, black, and red of Termier refer to Plato's statement 

 that these were the colors of the rocks quarried in the island for 

 building purposes. The story goes on to say that the land sunk 

 beneath the waves in a single night. 



Termier points out that 



Near Gibraltar the depth is 4.000 meters: then it rises suddenly to Madeira 

 and drops again to 5,000 meters between Madeira and the southern Azores. 

 It reasccnds again at least 1,000 meters in the neighborhood of these latter 

 islands, remains for a long distance between 1,000 and 4,000 meters to the 

 south and southwest of the Azores witli very abrupt projections ; some of which 

 approach very nearly to the surface of the sea. It then plunges to more than 

 5.000 and for a short distance to even more than G,000 meters, rises again 

 suddenly in a bound which corresponds with the pinnacle of the Bermudas, 

 remains burled under 4,000 meters of water to within a short distance of the 

 American coast, and tinally rises again in a steep acclivity towards the shore. 



He further alludes to the well-known fact that the eastern part 

 of the Atlantic from Tristan da Cunha, through St. Helena, Ascen- 

 sion, Cape Verde Islands, the Canaries, Madeira and neighboring 

 isles, the Azores, and the whole of the northeastern Atlantic from 

 Antrim to Iceland, Jan Mayen, and Greenland are either active 

 centers of volcanicity or have recently been so. The volcanic zone of 

 the eastern Atlantic is comparable in all respects to that which bor- 

 ders the west of America, and like it, is geographically related to 

 the marine depths which run j^arallel with them. The volcanoes of 

 the Pacific are in genetic relationship with the down-sagging of the 

 floor of the Pacific, and the median wrinkle, upon which lies these 

 volcanoes in the Atlantic, may be looked upon as a mobile zone 

 moving upward in equilibrium with the depression of the deeps on 

 either side. 



