Shores and Islands vial 
a single trace. Plato first mentioned the name Atlantis in his 
dialogues Timaeus and Critias. From that time on the name 
has been used by dreamy romanticists, philosophers, impa- 
tient social reformers and the like, almost as a synonym for 
Utopia. When Henry Schliemann, the great German arche- 
ologist, actually discovered the sites of Troy and Mycenae, 
which had long been considered legendary, interest was re- 
vived in the stories about Atlantis, the lost continent. Nu- 
merous Atlantean societies were formed, and still exist. Most 
of them are content to lie back in mystic adoration of the 
pictures of Atlantis their imaginations create, or perhaps 
they labor over some new addition to the extensive Atlantean 
literature which already numbers about 2,000 separate books 
and articles. Such semireligious groups resent scientific in- 
vestigation in the subject, this resentment even taking the 
form of violence. As recently as fifteen years ago, the pro- 
ceedings of a scholarly meeting at the Sorbonne were dis- 
rupted by Atlantean visionaries who hurled two bombs into 
the room. 
Geologists tell us that there was a portion of land in the At- 
lantic (along the mid-Atlantic ridge) which sank into the 
ocean sometime during the Pleistocene (1,000,000 B.C. to 
present ). However, it is generally supposed that its sinking 
occurred at such a remote date that no human civilization 
would have been possible. Whether or not there really is, 
somewhere on the ocean floor, a city of weed covered towers 
and walls, is a question which exploration on the ocean bot- 
tom must ultimately decide. 
HOW OLD IS THE OCEAN? 
The age of the ocean is evidently dependent upon the age 
of the earth, because in the natural sequence of events there 
