58 THE OCEAN RIVER 



the civilization and the island empire once presumed to have 

 existed outside the Gates of Gibraltar, about where the present 

 mid-Atlantic ridge rears up a mile or more from the ocean 

 floor east of the Sargasso Sea. Modern science has studied the 

 ocean floor, recorded the travel of earth shock, and drawn up 

 cores of sediment from the depths; and today we can say there 

 is little sure evidence and that Atlantis is merely a legend. Yet 

 the battle of opinion goes on, and a great library of pro and 

 con has accumulated since Plato first reported on Atlantis in 

 his Timeas and Gritias dialogues in the third century before 

 Ghrist. Other ancient writers also have written — but never at 

 first hand — on this mysterious classic world of Atlantis: 

 Homer in the seventh century B.C., Solon in the sixth, Hero- 

 dotus in the fourth. Today the legend will not down even 

 under the eye of modern science, for strange data keep cropping 

 out of oceanographic research that could use some such scheme 

 of explanation. Our purpose in this book is not partisan for the 

 poets or the scientists, the geologists or the biologists or anthro- 

 pologists. But we could not write the story of the Atlantic 

 world, nourished on the living stream of its revolving waters, 

 unless we put down what is known and conjectured of Atlantis. 

 We shall have to plot a beginning point somewhere in pre- 

 historic time in order to frame the environment of Atlantis — 

 if it did exist. Whatever rising or sinking in the earth's crust 

 went on before the final geological period has no relation to 

 the Atlantis we talk of. At the end of the Cenozoic era is the 

 quarternary period, the one in which we now exist, and in this 

 period science is pretty well resolved on a succession of ice 

 ages, with intermediate warm climate when the great ice fields 

 and glaciers were in retreat. Much is supposed to have hap- 

 pened in continental and oceanic changes of level or altitude 

 in these periods. The final retreat of the widespread American 

 and European ice fields occurred in the last thirty thousand 

 years, and established the basic habits of our present geogra- 



