"Among the great deeds of Athens, of which recollection is preserved in our books, there is one which should be placed above all others. Our books tell that the Athenians destroyed an army which came across the Atlantic Sea, and insolently invaded Europe and Asia; for this sea was then navigable, and beyond the strait where you place the Pillars of Hercules there was an island larger than Asia (Minor) and Libya combined. From this island one could pass easily to the other islands, and from these to the continent which lies around the interior sea. The sea on this side of the strait (the Mediterranean), of which we speak, resembles a harbor with its narrow entrance; but there is a genuine sea, and the land which surrounds it is a veritable continent. In the Island of Atlantis reigned three kings with great and marvelous power. They had under their dominion the whole Atlantis, several other islands, and some parts of the continent. At one time their power extended into Libya, and into Europe as far as Tyrrhenia: and uniting their whole force, they sought to destroy our countries at a blow; but their defeat stopped the invasion and gave entire independence to all the countries on this side the Pillars of Hercules. Afterward in one day and one fatal night, there came mighty earthquakes and inundations, which engulfed that warlike people. Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea and then that sea became inaccessible, so that navigation on it ceased on account of the quantity of mud which the engulfed island left in its place."
This invasion took place many ages before Athens was known as a Greek city. It is referred to an extremely remote antiquity. The festival known as the "Lesser Panathenaea," which, as symbolic devices used in it show, commemorated this triumph over the Atlantes, is said to have been instituted by the mythical Erichthonius in the earliest times remembered by Athenian tradition.
Brasseur de Bourbourg also claims that there is in the old Central American books a constant tradition of an immense catastrophe of the character supposed; that this tradition existed everywhere among the people when they first became known to Europeans; and that recollections of the catastrophe were preserved in some of their festivals, especially in one celebrated in the month of Izcalli, which was instituted to commemorate this frightful destruction of land and people, and in which "princes and people humbled themselves before the divinity, and besought him to withhold a return of such terrible calamities." This tradition affirms that a part of the continent extending into the Atlantic was destroyed in the manner supposed, and appears to indicate that the destruction was accomplished by a succession of frightful convulsions. Three are constantly mentioned, and sometimes there is mention of one or two others. "The land was shaken by frightful earthquakes, and the waves of the sea combined with volcanic fires to overwhelm and engulf it." Each convulsion swept away portions of the land, until the whole disappeared, leaving the line of the coast as it is now. Most of the inhabitants, overtaken amid their regular employments, were destroyed; but some escaped in ships, and some fled for safety to the summits of high mountains, or to portions of the land which, for a time, escaped immediate destruction. Quotations are made from the old books in which this tradition is said to be recorded, verifying Abbe Brasseur's position. But, as J. D. Baldwin says, "To criticise intelligently his interpretation of their significance, one needs to have a knowledge of those books and traditions equal at least to his own."
In addition to this so-called proof by the traditions of both the old and new world, he adds this philological argument:
"The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe. They are not Greek, and can not be referred to any known language of the Old World. But in the Nahnatl language we find immediately the radical a. atl, which signifies water.
"From this comes a series of words, such as atlan, on the border of or amid the water, from which we have the adjective Atlantic. A city named Atlan existed when the continent was discovered by Columbus, at the entrance of the Gulf of Uraba, in Darien, with a good harbor; it is now reduced to an unimportant pueblo named Aela."
We think the foregoing is a fair statement of the argument advanced by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, in support of his theory. We might add that the late Ignatius Donnelly, in his popular work, "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World," takes much the same position, and, like the venerable Abbe, gives free rein to his vivid imagination, and is restrained by no doubts suggested by scientific indications.
So far from geology lending the slightest confirmation to the idea of an engulfed Atlantis, Prof. Wyville Thompson has shown, in his "Depths of the Sea," that while oscillations of the land have considerably modified the boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean, the geological age of its basin dates as far back, at least, as the later secondary period. The study of its animal life, as revealed in dredging, strongly confirms this, disclosing an unbroken continuity of life on the Atlantic sea-bed from the Cretaceous to the present time; and, as Sir Charles Lyell has pointed out, in his "Principles of Geology," the entire evidence is adverse to the idea that the Canaries, the Madeiras, and the Azores are surviving fragments of a vast submerged island, or continuous area of the adjacent continent. There are, indeed, undoubted indications of volcanic action; but they furnish evidence of local upheaval, not of the submergence of extensive continental areas.
The leading geologists all agree that "our continents have long remained in nearly the same relative position," and the highest authorities in science concur in the belief that "the main features of the Atlantic basin have undergone no change within any recent geological period."
While, therefore, this theory appeals with subtle power to the imagination, by reason of its seductive plausibility; yet to those who attach any value to scientific evidence, such speculations present no serious claims on their study. On the other hand, it will be rejected without much regard to what can be said in its favor, for it interferes with current beliefs concerning antiquity and ancient history, and must encounter vehement contradiction from habits of thought fixed by these beliefs.