142 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



lay as, whose very bricks bear the records of the Lemurian 

 age. There rise the Rocky mountains, enriched by the 

 pillage of a land whose misfortune it was to perish be- 

 fore human pens existed to celebrate its beauty. There 

 tower the Alleghanies, only as a majestic dirt-heap result- 

 ing from the destruction of the North Atlantic continent. 

 There rises the Andean rampart of South America, reared 

 for the benefit of the human age, but at the cost of a pre- 

 human land of verdure and beauty whose very rags we 

 style " the beautiful Antilles." 



There was an ancient land whose name has long sur- 

 vived in tradition as Atlantis. It has been lost to human 

 eyes and to human knowledge for more than thirty-five 

 centuries. Plato, in the Timceus and in the Critias, has 

 preserved for us a tradition said by him to be embodied 

 in a lost poem by Solon, who lived two hundred years 

 before Plato, in the sixth century before Christ. Solon 

 pretended to have learned the tradition of Atlantis from 

 the Egyptian priests, from whom he received much of the 

 learning which made him one of the " Seven Wise Men " 

 of Greece. This lost land was situated beyond the Pillars 

 of Hercules, and was the seat of a civilization far supe- 

 rior to that of the cave-dwellers who inhabited Europe. 

 It possessed, according to Plato, cities and palaces and 

 temples. It supported a vast army, and, nine thousand 

 years before Plato, dispatched a military expedition for 

 the conquest of northern Africa. Only Egypt successfully 

 resisted. Plato's date of 9600 B.C. must be taken in an 

 oriental sense. The Athenian kings, Cecrops and Erech- 

 theus, mentioned as contemporaries of this campaign, are 

 known to have flourished 1582 and 1409 B.C. Theopompus 

 tells us a similar story respecting the people of Atlantis; 



