We see also that this island was connected with the continents east and west by great ridges of land.
The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges, although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the continents on both sides of it.
Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell; on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood, and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of all the mythologies?
{p. 389}
CHAPTER IV.
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.
LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {sic} to some of my readers.
First, it may be said:
"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow."
True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains, hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.