Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/190

172 of Atlantis we find a chain of mountains, known from the most ancient times as the Atlas Mountains. Whence this name Atlas, if it be not from the name of the great king of Atlantis? And if this be not its origin, how comes it that we find it in the most north-western corner of Africa? And how does it happen that in the time of Herodotus there dwelt near this mountain-chain a people called the Atlantes, probably a remnant of a colony from Solon's island? How comes it that the people of the Barbary States were known to the Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians as the "Atlantes," this name being especially applied to the inhabitants of Fezzan and Bilma? Where did they get the name from? There is no etymology for it east of the Atlantic Ocean. (Lenormant's "Anc. Hist. of the East," p. 253.)

Look at it! An "Atlas" mountain on the shore of Africa; an "Atlan" town on the shore of America; the "Atlantes" living along the north and west coast of Africa; an Aztec people from Aztlan, in Central America; an ocean rolling between the two worlds called the "Atlantic;" a mythological deity called "Atlas" holding the world on his shoulders; and an immemorial tradition of an island of Atlantis. Can all these things be the result of accident?

4. Plato says that there was a "passage west from Atlantis to the rest of the islands, as well as from these islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds that real sea." He calls it a real sea, as contradistinguished from the Mediterranean, which, as he says, is not a real sea (or ocean) but a landlocked body of water, like a harbor.

Now, Plato might have created Atlantis out of his imagination; but how could he have invented the islands beyond (the West India Islands), and the whole continent (America) enclosing that real sea? If we look at the map, we see that the continent of America does "surround" the ocean in a great half-circle. Could Plato have guessed all this? If there had been no Atlantis, and no series of voyages from it that