108 DANIEL WILSON ON 
from the Cretaceous period to the present time; and, as Sir Charles Lyell has pointed out, 
in his “ Principles of Geology,” the entire evidence is adverse to the idea that the Canaries, 
the Madeiras, and the Azores, are surviving fragments of a vast submerged island, or 
continuous area of the adjacent continent. There are, indeed, undoubted indications of 
volcanic action ; but they furnish evidence of local upheaval, not of the submergence of 
extensive continental areas. 
But it is an easy, as well as a pleasant pastime, to evolve either a camel or a continent 
out of the depths of one’s own inner consciousness. To such fanciful speculators, the lost 
Atlantis will ever offer a tempting basis on which to found their unsubstantial creations. 
Mr. H. H. Bancroft, when alluding to the subject in his “Native Races of the Pacific 
States,” refers to forty-two different works for notices and speculations concerning Atlantis. 
The latest advocacy of the idea of an actual island-continent of the mid-Atlantic, literally 
engulphed in the ocean, within a period authentically embraced by historical tradition, is 
to be found in its most popular form in Mr. Ignatius Donnelly’s “Atlantis, the Antedilu- 
vian World.” By him, as by Abbé Brasseur, the concurrent opinions of the highest 
authorities in science, that the main features of the Atlantic basin have undergone no 
change within any recent geological period, are wholly ignored. To those, therefore, who 
attach any value to scientific evidence, such speculations present no serious claims on 
their study. There is, indeed, an idea favoured by certain students of science, who carry the 
spirit cf nationality into regions ordinarily regarded as lying outside of any sectional pride, 
that, geologically speaking, America is the older continent. It may at least be accepted as 
beyond dispute, that this continent and the great Atlantic basin intervening between it 
and Europe are alike of a geological antiquity which places the age of either entirely 
apart from all speculations affecting human history. But, such fancies are wholly super- 
fluous. The idea of intercourse between the Old and the New World prior to the fifteenth 
century, passed from the region of speculation to the domain of historical fact, when the 
publication of the “ Antiquitates American” and the ‘‘ Grénland’s Historiske Mindes- 
mœærker,” by the antiquaries of Copenhagen, adduced contemporary authorities, and 
indisputably genuine runic inscriptions, in proof of the visits of the Northmen to Green- 
land and the mainland of North America, before the close of the tenth century. 
The idea of pre-Columbian intercourse between Europe and America, is thus no 
novelty. What we have anew to consider is, whether, in its wider aspect, it is more con- 
sistent with probability than the revived notion of a continent engulphed in the Atlantic 
Ocean ? The earliest students of American antiquities turned to Pheenicia, Egypt, or other 
old-world centres of early civilisation, for the source of Mexican, Peruvian, and Central 
American art or letters; and, indeed, so long as the unity of the human race remained 
unquestioned, some theory of a common source for the races of the Old and the New World 
was inevitable. The idea, therefore, that the new world which Columbus revealed, 
was none other than the long lost Atlantis, is one that has probably suggested itself 
independently to many minds. Other references to America have been sought for in 
obscure allusions of Herodotus, Seneca, Pliny, and other classical writers, to islands or con- 
tinents in the ocean which extended beyond the western verge of the world as known to 
them. That such allusions should be vague, was inevitable. If they had any foundation 
in a knowledge by elder generations of this western hemisphere, the tradition had come 
down to them by the oral transmissions of centuries; while their knowledge of their own 
