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Atlantis

The only source of the legend about Atlantis is found in Plato, who narrates the story heard by him through three intermediaries (his friend Critias, his grandfather Critias the Elder, and Solon, the friend of the latter) from an Egyptian priest.

The innumerable identifications of the site of Atlantis—wherever a legend of a submerged city is told or submerged walls are found, from Helgoland to Thera, to the Caribbean, to name only a few—are all baseless. Plato gave a definite description—opposite the Pillars of Heracles in the Ocean. This signifies the Atlantic Ocean, not far from Gibraltar.

When M. Ewing found submerged beaches near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, he mentioned the Atlantis myth but, not to appear credulous, rejected it; nevertheless he claimed that the land must have sunk a thousand feet. From the Azores to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is the location of Atlantis.

The cause of Atlantis’ submergence was, as Plato transmits, in a disturbance effected by a celestial body passing close to the earth. The cause made land and sea change places in more than one area simultaneously: therefore many submerged cities and islands have been discovered in seas and oceans. Atlantis must have been a great colonizing power, as Plato asserts, and its disappearance could impress, as would a total submergence of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, at the apogee of its might.