THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1933. THE LOST CONTINENT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22136, 14 December 1933, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1933. THE LOST CONTINENT

Scientists are too often the enemies of legend to please the dreamer and the idealist. As the outcome of their coldly practical investigations, fancies which have given philosophers food for speculation and the common people material for romantic tales have been dispelled. It is impossible for the schoolboy to believe that a pearly heaven surmounts the blue ceiling of the world when Soviet balloonists have blundered far beyond the range of man’s vision and returned unsanetified to earth; it is difficult to accept any longer Eastern legends concerning the malignant spirits which have their abode on the world’s highest mountain after British airmen have blandly soared over the summit of Everest and discovered nothing but ice and natural elements. Certain romantic people should be filled, then, with gratitude at the discoveries of the Sir John Murray Oceanographic Expedition, which leave them strengthened in one of their articles of faith—that of the existence of a lost continent. The oceanographer is a practical man, and his findings are not expressed in the language that might best perpetuate attractive traditions, yet there is the fact that the Murray expedition has discovered traces of a lost continent in the Indian Ocean. On this strictly material basis may arise, once more, pleasant, provocative dreams of a past civilisation in which life was of a different pattern from that we know too well. It requires only a little transposition of legend, due allowance

being made for the hazy cartography of the ancient philosophers, to permit the identification of that Lemuria, which the expedition reports, with the legendary islands of Atlantis. Plato’s belief in a lost continent was based on records for which it may conceivably be claimed that they are unimpeachable, since no trace of them remains, and the fact that Atlantis was not placed by him in the position which the oceanographers now assign to Lemuria constitutes no reason for concluding he was mistaken save in his geography. Nor is the story of a lost continent confined to any one race. Atlantis in its attributed salubriousness may be dismissed as a mere Grecian fantasy, but what of the contention of Aztec archaeologists that the name itself is of pre-Grecian derivation? And what of the mythical lands which are perpetuated in the lore of other civilisations —the Portuguese Antilla, the lost Breton island of Is, the Avalon of King Arthur, and that Green Island which was still marked on prosaic English charts seventy-five years ago? The subject has intrigued historians and philosophers from Plato and Marcellus to Bacon and Ignatius Donnelly, and has given novelists from Verne to the Australian, Dale Collins, material for diverting romances. Voltaire, the Encyclopedia Britannica reminds us, admitted the possibility of an t island and a people having been lost beyond trace, and he could not bo described as credulous. With the rediscovery of Lemuria, of course, the most interesting and, it may well be, the most disillusioning task of the oceanographers has still to be undertaken. Will there be found among the clammy submarine ranges of the Indian Ocean the real cradle of the human race? Is it possible that the rusty remains will be uncovered of the hydro-turbines and flying machines possessed by the Atlantans of Bacon’s imaginings? Will Plato’s reliability as a historian be impugned, while his powers of invention are enhanced, by an investigation of the real lost continent? The prospects are that the expedition’s discovery will answer none of these questions, for the truth which lies at the bottom of the sea must have become elusive in the centuries since Lemuria felt the warmth of the sun. Still, the existence of a lost continent remains a most attractive subject for speculation. And if the findings of the Murray expedition do nothing to satisfy these pleasant excursions of philosophers, they at least strengthen the basis on which such an enrichment of the literatures of the world has been laid, reminding the incredulous once again that the truth is no stranger to fiction.