6 AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY. 



an officer of the British army during the war of the Revolution, was much among 

 the Indians, wrote a tract on the subject. Adair, the distinguished Dr. Elias 

 Boudinot, Rev. Ethan Smith, the late M. M. Noah, Lord Kingsborough, and Mrs. 

 St. Simon, continue the series of persevering advocates of that view of the ques- 

 tion. 



Profane history and the ancient classics, have suggested more numerous, if not 

 more plausible conjectures, respecting the origin of the Americans. Vague intima- 

 tions derived from that mysterious repository of primeval lore, the Egyptian Priest- 

 hood, have been supposed to warrant a belief in the former existence of a seat of 

 arts and empire now buried beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Of these the most dis- 

 tinct is recorded in the Timeeus of Plato as having been related to Solon, about 

 six hundred years before Christ, by a priest of a temple in the Delta. This keeper 

 of the secrets of the past, looking down, as it were, from a superior antiquity, tells 

 Solon that the Greeks are ever children ; that an air of youth is visible in all their 

 histories ; while in the Egyptian temples are the records of ages and nations long 

 buried in obliyion. He proceeds to inform him that there have been innumerable 

 deluges and conflagrations of the regions of the earth; some of them faintly 

 shadowed in the fables and mutilated traditions of the Greeks. In one of these 

 the great Island of Atlantis, larger than Lybia and Asia together, was submerged 

 in the ocean that inherits its name. This island was stated to be opposite the 

 Straits of Gades (Gibraltar), and its inhabitants extended their sway over all the 

 adjoining regions, until checked by some ancestors of the Athenians. 



Allusions to this lost island, or continent, are frequent in Greek and Roman 

 authors, and it is not supposed to be a fiction of Plato's devising. • Buffon believed 

 in the probability of the story; and Bailly, in his "Lettres sur TAtlantide de 

 Platon," maintains its reality by the additional authorities of Homer, Sancho- 

 niathon, and Diodorus Siculus. Whether the island was in fact submerged, or 

 simply the means of communication with it lost, has been a question much dis- 

 cussed. Various islands have been assigned as its locality, and even regions in the 

 north of Europe connected with the main land. Many supposed it to be America. 

 According to Plato, there were first smaller islands from which there was an easy 

 passage to the larger one, or continent, beyond. The theory of a chain of islands, 

 with slight intervals, if not a solid body of land, quite across both the Atlantic and 

 Pacific Oceans, is supposed, by some modern writers, to be geographically sus- 

 tained. 



The celebrated lines in the "Medea" of Seneca, who lived about the time of our 

 Saviour, have been received as indicating either a ray of traditionary light or a 

 prophetic inspiration. 1 Humboldt and Bishop Horsley have shown how slight are 



1 Venient annis sscula seris 

 Quibns Oceanus vincula reruru 

 Laxet, et ingens pateat tcllus, 

 Tethysque novas detegat orbcs, 

 Nee sit terris ultima Thulc." 



