THE LOST ATLANTIS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 259, 2 November 1931, Page 6

THE LOST ATLANTIS.

Lured by the age-old legend of the lost continent of Atlantis, and guided by an eighty-year-ckl Admiralty chart, a British warship has set forth to 'take soundings of a patch of shallow water in the ocean depths,' 250 miles north of the Azores (says the "Christian Science Monitor"). These soundings may or may not throw light on the tradition, but at any rate by all analogies the place ought to be a good investigating ground, it is 'believed. This is 'by no means the first time that soundings have been taken in this part of the Atlantic. During the last century Britain, Germany and the United States sent out several expeditions without arriving at any definite conclusions. The story of Atlantis, whether it be a fact or myth, has fascinated men's imagination foi> centurios. The earliest account of Atlantis,' a huge land mass situated in midAtlantic, and long since sunk beneath the wave?, is to be found in the "Timaeus" and "Critias"' of Plato; where it is said that the AtlanteaiirS traded extensively with foreign peoples, and built great temples, palaces and bridges of white, red and black stones. About 9000 B.C. they were supposed to have\jivaded the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. This Platonic account receives confirmation from legends to a somewhat similar effect found in medieval Europe, and among the Indians of ■' North and South America. A certain amount of geological and , ' biological,, evidence can also be called to support it. The bed of the Atlantic is the most unstable area on the earth's surface, and even during the last thirty years it has undergone several "considerable changes. Theoretically, nothing canJx: more probable than that some violent geological disturbance may have at some far distant date submerged a'large land mass beneath its waves. Recent geological theories, however, are against the Atlantis hypothesis. It has been suggested that Europe and America were, in the dim past a single mass.which subsequently split, the two, parts 'both drifting westward, ibat America, showing the greater speed. If this is so the. supposition of a lost continent in the Atlantic has to be abandoned.