226 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 11)15. 



imdoiibtedly, has not stopped growing deeper; the volcanoes of the 

 Mediterranean appear on the margin of great abysses recently opened 

 and into which enormous mountains have fallen. It must be, there- 

 fore, that there is also in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, still 

 present, a certain mobility, and that the median wrinkle of this bot- 

 tom, already much elevated above it, has not finished its relative 

 movement upward in proportion to the eastern depression. While 

 the continental shores of the Atlantic now appear immobile, and a 

 hundred times more impassive than the Pacific shores, the bottom of 

 the Atlantic is in movement in the entire eastern zone, about 3,000 

 kilometers (1,875 miles) broad, which comprises Iceland, the Azores, 

 Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands. Here there is 

 even now an unstable zone on the planet's surface, and in such a zone 

 the most terrible cataclysms may at any moment be taking place. 



Some cataclysms certainly have occurred, and they date only as 

 from yesterday. I ask all those who are concerned with the problem 

 of Atlantis to listen attentively and to impress on their mind this 

 brief history ; there is none more significant : In the summer of 1898 

 a ship was employed in the laying of the submarine telegraphic cable 

 which binds Brest to Cape Cod. The cable had been broken, and 

 they were trying to fish it up again by means of grappling irons. It 

 was in north latitude 47° 0' and longitude 29° 40' west from Paris, 

 at a point about 500 miles north of the Azores. The mean depth 

 was pretty nearly 1,700 fathoms, or 3,100 meters. The relaying of 

 the cable presented great difficulties, and for several days it was 

 necessary to drag the grappling irons over the bottom. This was 

 established: The bottom of the sea in those parts presents the char- 

 acteristics of a mountainous country, with high summits, steep slopes, 

 and deep valleys. The summits are rocky, and there are oozes only in 

 the hollows of the valleys. The grappling iron, in following this 

 much-disturbed surface, was constantly being caught in the rocks by 

 hard points and sharp edges; it came up almost always broken or 

 twisted, and the broken pieces recovered bore large coarse strise and 

 traces of violent and rapid wear. On several returns, they found 

 betAveen the teeth of the grappling iron little mineral splinters, hav- 

 ing the appearance of recently broken chips. All these fragments 

 belonged to the same class of rocks. The unanimous opinion of the 

 engineers who were present at the dredging was that the chips in 

 question had been detached from a bare rock, an actual outcropping, 

 sharp-edged and angular. The region whence the chips came was 

 furthermore precisely that where the soundings had revealed the 

 highest submarine summits and the almost complete absence of oozes. 

 The fragments, thus torn from the rocky outcrops of the bottom of 

 the Atlantic, are of a vitreous lava, having the chemical composition 

 of the basalts and called tacliylyte by the petrographers. We are 



