THE LOST CONTINENT.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5847, 25 December 1879, Page 2

THE LOST CONTINENT.

(From the Fopular Science Monthly.) One of the most plausible, and believed by many scientists to be the true theory, is this : Ages ago the Americas presented a very different appearance from what, they now do. Then an immense peninsula extended itself from Mexico, Central America and New Granada so far into the Atlantic that the Madeiras, Azores, and West India Islands are now fragments of it. This peninsula was a fair and fertile country, inhabited by rich and civilized nations, a people versed, in the arts of war; and civilisation—a country covered wiffirTarge cities and magnificent palaces, them rtfleri,' according to tradition, reigning'not only''ofr the Atlantic Continent, "but over islands, tar aao near, even into Europe and Asia. Suddenly, without warning, this whole fair laud gulfed by the sea in a mighty convulsion of nature. Now this catastrophe is not sible .or even improbable. Instances , are -not wanting,of large-(raqta of land, seven, hundred miles in‘extent, disappearing in a like manner, fee' Island",. suddenly apas sudden!? disappeared, V- In' ISiVdurihg'an, *Tndia,‘*an Immense ,nv® p Indus D %° C T pira.ijis’flaoft' "The'whole bed of the Atlantic,

where Atlantis is said to have been situated, consists of extinct volcanoes. The terribh Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the later American shock created commotion throughou' the whole Atlantic area. That Atlantis possessed great facilities for making a suddei exit cannot he doubted. Its very situatioi gives good color to the narratives of ancient Grecian historians and Toeletian traditions that “it disappeared by earthquakes and inundations.”