.... Afterward came a day and night of great floods and
earthquakes; Atlantis disappeared, swallowed by the waves.

Geologists and geographers have seriously tried to find evidence of
Atlantis having existed in the Atlantic, whether as a portion of the
American continent, or as a huge island in the ocean which could have
served as a stepping-stone between the Western World and the Eastern.
From a series of deep-sea soundings ordered by the British, American,
and German Governments, it is now very well known that in the middle of
the Atlantic basin there is a ridge, running north and south, whose
depth is less than 1,000 fathoms, while the valleys east and west of it
average 3,000 fathoms. At the Azores the North Atlantic ridge becomes
broader. The theory is that a part of the ridge-plateau was the Atlantis
of Plato that "disappeared swallowed by the waves." (Nature, xv, 158,
553, xxvii, 25; Science, June 29, 1883.)

Buffon, the naturalist, with reference to fauna and flora, dated the
separation of the new and old world "from the catastrophe of Atlantis"
(Epoques, ix, 570); and Sir Charles Lyell confessed a temptation to
"accept the theory of an Atlantis island in the northern Atlantic."
(Geology, p. 141.)

The following account "from an historian of the fourth century B. C." is
another possible reference to a portion of America--from a translation
"delivered in English," 1576.

Selenus told Midas that without this worlde there is a continent or
percell of dry lande which in greatnesse (as hee reported) was
unmeasureable; that it nourished and maintained, by the benifite of
the greene meadowes and pasture plots, sundrye bigge and mighty
beastes; that the men which inhabite the same climate exceede the
stature of us twise, and yet the length of there life is not equale
to ours.

The historian Plutarch, in his Morals, gives an account of Ogygia, with
an illusion to a continent, possibly America:

An island, Ogygia, lies in the arms of the Ocean, about five days'
sail west from Britain.... The adjacent sea is termed the
Saturnian, and the continent by which the great sea is circularly
environed is distant from Ogygia about 5,000 stadia, but from the
other islands not so far.... One of the men paid a visit to the
great island, as they called Europe. From him the narrator learned
many things about the state of men after death--the conclusion