ATLANTIC LEGEND 59 



phy and climate within the time most students now feel sure 

 modern man existed in the western world. This is called the 

 holocene period. Some time within this period Atlantis is said 

 to have occupied a large portion of the eastern North Atlantic 

 Ocean, with a flourishing and advanced civilization essentially 

 agricultural and seafaring, with a high degree of artistic devel- 

 opment. 



How do we come to believe a thing exists that we have not 

 seen? Scientists, from the study of spectra and a knowledge of 

 the orderly progression of known phenomena, have success- 

 fully deduced the presence of undiscovered planets and metals 

 and then proceeded to discover them in fact. Doctors diagnose 

 diseased conditions not otherwise visible to them, just as geolo- 

 gists detect metals and oil beyond sight or reach. One reason 

 the legend of Atlantis has refused to die is the fact that in 

 many allied sciences like geology, biology, and anthropology 

 certain unexplained trails of investigation end around the 

 shores of the North Atlantic, and a hypothetical Atlantis 

 fitted into the blank of this puzzle answers many of these 

 questions in a way that would not be scientifically incredible. 



The protagonists of lost Atlantis explain the fact that no 

 present evidence of the civilization remains, no ruined cities, 

 no body of art or writing, by arguing that, just as Plato first 

 reported through Solon from the ancient Egyptian records, a 

 great cataclysm of flood and earthquake changed the surface 

 of the lands and waters of the Mediterranean and Atlantic 

 world sometime about ten thousand years before Christ. They 

 further point out the broken ends of this civilization in the 

 earliest beginnings of neighboring civilizations bordering the 

 shores of the Atlantic. These exist if we will but look, they 

 say, in England, France, Spain, the Azores, the Canary Isles, 

 the West Indies, and even in Mayan Yucatan, Guatemala, and 

 Peru. In all these lands — before the deluge and the fiery 

 whirlwinds from the sky and the shifting of the very crust of 



