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The Library
Picture

American Geographical Society
January 1917

​


​NOTE
 In 1912, French geologist Pierre Termier delivered a lecture laying out the case for the reality of Atlantis. This lecture was translated into English in 1915 and published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1916. The piece caused a stir, leading the American Geographical Society to commission two reviews of his lecture, which were published in January 1917. Further essays on the subject were published in the same journal in May.

ATLANTIS, THE “LOST” CONTINENT
A Review of Termier’s Evidence

In order that its readers might have a well-balanced criticism of Termier’s brilliant paper on the question of Atlantis, the “lost” continent of the Atlantic, the Society has requested two independent reviews. The first is by Dr. Rudolph Schuller, formerly of the Museo Goeldi of Para, Brazil, a well-known specialist in historical geography, and the second is by Professor Charles Schuchert of Yale University, one of the foremost authorities in historical geology and paleontology.
 
Termier does not believe geology will solve the problem, though he uses arguments with geological implications. On the other hand, portions of the earliest maps recording the names and positions of the islands are based wholly on traditions whose origins it seems impossible to determine. To have both sides of the question discussed by competent critics is at least to put us in possession of Termier’s strongest points.
​
(I) By RUDOLPH SCHULLER
For many centuries the question of Atlantis and other mythological islands said to exist beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the “shadowy,” “gloomy” ocean have engaged the interest and enthusiasm of man. The same question has been lately taken up by a noted French scholar, Professor Pierre Termier, Director of the Geological Survey of France, in an article [1] which, from several points of view, is one of the foremost contributions to that complex theme.
 
Termier first transcribes the passage from the “Timaeus,” or “Concerning Nature,” of Plato, who, as will be remembered, has preserved for us the tale of Atlantis. There are four speakers: Timaeus, Socrates, Hermocrates, and Critias. The latter, in referring to Solon, the great law-giver of Athens six hundred years before the Christian era, tells of a journey that this ancestor of Plato made to Sais, in the delta of Egypt. An old Egyptian priest revealed to him there the history of the beginning of Athens, “all but forgotten by the Athenians.”
 
“That sea (the Atlantic),” we read in the most interesting part of the narrative, “was then navigable and had an island fronting that mouth which you (Solon) in your tongue call the Columns of Hercules . . . . And there was a passage hence to the rest of the islands, as well as from these islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds that sea . . . . . The island of Atlantis itself was plunged beneath the sea and entirely disappeared; whence even now that sea is neither navigable nor to be traced out, being blocked up by the great depth of mud which the subsiding island produced.”
 
As to the authenticity of Solon’s trip to Egypt, we also possess the testimony of the historian Plutarch, who uses the words “On the Canopian shore, by the Nile’s deep mouth” when dealing with the ten years’ absence of the sage from Athens. The same authority, in referring to Plato’s description of Atlantis, says: “Plato, ambitious to cultivate and adorn the subject of the Island of Atlantis as a delightful spot in some fair field unoccupied, to which also he had some claim by reason of his being related to Solon, laid out magnificent courts and enclosures and erected a grand entrance to it, such as no other story, fable, or poem ever bad. But, as he began it late, he ended his life before the work was completed, so that the more the reader is delighted with the part that is written, the more regret he has to find it unfinished.”
 
There can be no question that Plato’s narrative of Atlantis has not at all the coloring of a mere fable. “It is of an exactness almost scientific,” Termier correctly observes.
 
From modern geological, zoölogical, and botanical researches, it seems highly probable that, during the geological period called Eocene and until the Pliocene and Miocene, a land-bridge across the present Atlantic Ocean connected Europe with this continent. A cataclysm followed. Submersions and convulsions entirely changed the aspect of that section of the earth. It is not known whether they were of tectonic or of volcanic origin. Termier seems to assume the latter. The West Indies, the Bermudas, the Canaries, the Azores, and other islands may be the remains of the vast island or continent submerged in the Atlantic Ocean. Was such a catastrophe possible‘? The cataclysm is undoubted, asserts the French scholar. “One thing alone,” says he, “remains to be proved—that the cataclysm which caused this island to disappear was subsequent to the appearance of man in western Europe.”
 
Termier does not believe that the question respecting Atlantis, the “fabled island” of most authors, is insolvable, though neither geology nor zoology, he observes, will solve it. “These two sciences appear to have told all that they can tell; and it is from anthropology, from ethnology, and, lastly, from oceanography” that he is “now awaiting the final answer.” Of course, it is a petitio principii.
 
As to anthropology, it seems to me very opportune to refer here in brief to the general conclusions reached by Dr. Hrdlička of the United States National Museum with regard to the origin of man in America in his paper “The Genesis of the American Indian” presented to the last International Congress of Americanists, Washington, 1916. [2]
 
The author first considers the question of the unity or plurality of the American race. In answering this question he decides in favor of the original unity of the Indian race in America. He bases his conclusion upon the similarities of language, culture, mentality, and physique. Then he takes up the question of the antiquity of the race on this continent. Hrdliéka does not think that the Indian was autochthonous on this continent. This belief is based upon the absence of the inferior primates of the anthropoid type in America, upon the assumption of the unity of the species homo sapiens, and upon the circumstance that the primitive types of humanity living in Europe during the Quaternary or Glacial Period could not have come from America. According to this authority, nonhuman remains of geological antiquity have been demonstrated to exist on the American continent. The third question he considers is the source of the racial elements that occupy America and the epoch of the occupation.
 
With respect to the first point Hrdlička passes in review the means of transportation of prehistoric man; the geographical situation of America with regard to the other continents; the anthropological characteristics of the American Indian, which he compares with the primitive characteristics of the great ethnic groups of other parts of the world. And from these considerations he concludes that the American aborigines come only from Asia.
 
Here we have another petitio principii.
 
On the other hand, famous anthropologists have persistently rejected the alleged Asiatic origin of American man.
 
Of course, relations between America and Asia, through Bering Strait, have formerly existed and still exist. [3] But we should not forget that Siberia was peopled only in a relatively recent period, in Neolithic time, and that during this period the opposite land of Alaska was covered in part by enormous glaciers, a circumstance making relations between the man of the Old World and of the New World through these regions rather improbable.
 
Now, accepting, as Dr. Hrdlička does, the theory of the unity of mankind, then it would appear as if we are obliged to go back to a distant geological past to prove the connection, and to assume the peopling of America from Europe. And this theory is, as far as I know, accepted by the greatest specialists in paleo-anthropology, as, for instance, Dr. Robert Lehmann-Nitsche of the La Plata Museum, and also by other noted scientists, such as Andree and Luschan.
 
The above quoted land-bridge, if it existed during the Eocene and until the Pliocene and Miocene, would furnish the original connection of the early man of the Old and the New World.
 
Be that as it may, the antiquity of man in America is so great that-—at least in the present state of our science—we can consider him autochthonous. The same may be said of American native culture and civilization. They may have received certain elements from outside; however, these infiltrations of alien cultural elements could never have influenced to any great extent the spontaneous development of American native culture.
 
“Did man,” asks the French author, “then live who could withstand the reaction and transmit the memory of that cataclysm?” This is thus far an open question. One link is missing. Atlantis was plunged into the “gloomy sea.” And will it ever be possible to disclose what the waves of the ocean conceal? I will leave it to others to answer this question.
 
Many scholars have thought Atlantis to be America, because Plato states that an easy passage existed from this island to other islands which lay near a continent exceeding in size all Europe and Asia. Of course, most of these accounts are speculations without scientific foundations. To prove that in Plato’s work there are to be found allusions to the western hemisphere, the alleged evidence ought to be, if not incontestable, at least serious and plausible.
 
In the first instance, the philosopher speaks of an island called Atlantis. And the tale of the submerged island has been for many centuries the favorite theme of the superstitious mariners of the maritime centers of western Europe. As an island it is also preserved on the first cartographical productions. After the discovery of America, its name, in the form of “the Antilles,” was given to the islands at the present termed “West Indies.”
 
The study of the problem of the Island of Atlantis is unquestionably of high scientific importance. The fact that the narrative of the island’s submersion has been regarded by most scholars as a “fabled tale” proves little or nothing. United science may be enabled to tell us who were those men who lived, loved, and labored in that western island ages before the tradition gave rise to the legends regarding the dangers and horrors pervading the “gloomy ocean.”
​
(II) By CHARLES SCHUCHERT
It is well known that Professor Termier is not only a good geologist but also a great lover of the beautiful and much given to the poetic form of speaking and writing. At the recent meetings of the International Geological Congress in Canada many of us came under his spell, and we are thankful to the Smithsonian Institution for presenting so good a translation of the stimulating lecture on “Atlantis” that he delivered at the Oceanographic Institute of France in 1912. [4] Most of us will agree with the facts presented, but as to his conclusions there will be differences of opinion of a fundamental kind.
 
We learn from Plato that an Egyptian priest told Solon (born 638 B.C.) that Atlantis, “larger than Asia and Africa,” was destroyed with great earthquakes and inundations; “in a single day and one fatal night, all who had been warriors against you [Athenians] were swallowed up. The Island of Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea,” seemingly at some time between 5,000 and 9,000 years before the Christian era. Atlantis had “white, black, and red” building stones and “mines yielding all the metals useful to man.” Plato’s description, according to Termier, “tallies well with what we would imagine today of a great land submerged in the region of the Azores,” a continent sunk into the “sea of darkness” of the Egyptians, a darkness that was not dispelled until Columbus discovered America.
 
Termier tells us that all of the eastern Atlantic is a great volcanic zone, stretching from Iceland south for 1,900 miles, that off Europe and Africa volcanoes are abundant, and, in fact, that many of the islands in this zone “are either integrally or in greater part formed of lava,” most of them rising steeply out of great depths. The Azores are true volcanic and oceanic islands, and it is almost certain that they never had land connections with the continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. If there is any truth in Plato ’s' thrilling account, we must look for Atlantis off the western coast of Africa, and here we find that five of the Cape Verde Islands and three of the Canaries have rocks that are unmistakably like those common to the continents. Taking into consideration also the living plants and animals of these islands, many of which are of European-Mediterranean affinities of late Tertiary time, we see that the evidence appears to indicate clearly that the Cape Verde and Canary Islands are fragments of a greater Africa. [5] It is therefore not to the north of the Pillars of Hercules that we should look for Atlantis, but to the southwest of the rock of Gibraltar. What evidence there may be to show that this fracturing and breaking down of western Africa took place as suddenly as related by Plato or that it occurred about 10,000 years ago is as yet unknown to geologists.
 
Termier relates that a cable-laying ship grappling for the broken Brest-Cape Cod cable in 1898 brought up from depths averaging 3,000 meters rock splinters of a vitreous lava, a basalt known to petrographers as tachylyte. He regards this occurrence as of the greatest significance in showing that a large area of the Atlantic has gone deep beneath the surface of the ocean, concluding that the rock “could solidify into this condition only under atmospheric pressure. Under several atmospheres, and more especially under 3,000 meters of water, it might have crystallized.” This lava field having, as he holds, formed above the level of the sea, has since sunk 9,750 feet. However, as to vitreous lava also forming beneath the sea he says nothing, but petrographers admit that they know little of this possibility. At least some of them believe it can form also at the great depth cited, where the temperature of the water is near the freezing point of the Fahrenheit scale. It is not pressure so much as it is a quick loss of temperature that brings about the vitreous structure in lava. In other words, vitreous lava apparently can be formed as well in the ocean depths as on the lands. What the cable layers got was probably the superficial glassy crust of probable subterranean lava flows, and the presence of tachylyte on the ocean bottom can hardly be regarded as proof positive that a large area of the North Atlantic, recently land, is now about 10,000 feet beneath the sea.
 
The greater question, Was Africa ever united to South America? is being answered by biologists and geologists “Yes” and “No.” The writer believes in this connection previous to the Tertiary, and thinks that the down-breaking of western Gondwana began in the late Lower Cretaceous, with complete severance long before the close of Eocene time, for marine strata of this age are general along the western border of Africa. (Gondwana during Paleozoic and Mesozoic time extended unbroken from India across the Indian Ocean to Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and across the Atlantic, embracing Brazil and much of South America.) On the other hand, if this land-bridge had continued unbroken into Tertiary time, even only as late as the later Eocene, then certainly the wonderful fossil mammalian faunas of Argentina should reveal many and unmistakable African links. The African affinities in the ancient South American mammalian faunas are, however, so slight as to give but a limited support to the theory that Gondwana was still in existence in early Tertiary time, and none at all to the theory that the South Atlantic bridge was present in the Miocene.
 
Even though we do not agree with Professor Termier’s thesis that there is truth in Plato’s Atlantis, we thank him for the glowing account he has given us, with its incidental revelations of French warmth of character and nobility of mind, and for the stimulus that the article will give to paleogeographic research.
​
Notes
[1] Pierre Termier: Atlantis. Annual Rept. of the Smithsonian Institute for 1915, pp. 219-234. Washington. 1916 (translated from Bull. de l’Inst. Océanogr. No. 256. Monaco. 1913).
 
For other recent discussions of the problem see--
 
Louis Germain: Le problème de l’Atlantide et la Zoologie. Annales de Géogr., Vol. 2. 1913. pp. 209-226.
 
L. F. Navarro: Estado actual del problema de la Atlantis. Bol. Real. Geogr. Vol. 58. 1916. pp. 178-212. Madrid.
 
[2] Not yet published.
 
[3] On one phase of these relations, the migration of mythological elements, see Paul Ehrenreich: Mythen und Legenden der südamerikanischen Urvölker und ihre Beziehungen zu denen Nordamerikas und der alten Welt (Supplement to Zeitschr. für Ethnol. Vol. 87, 1905), pp. 67-68 and 77, based on the work of Boss and the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1903.
 
[4] See footnote 1 to preceding section.
 
[5] See C. Gazel: Die mittelatlantischen Vulkaninsein. Handbuch der regionalen Geologie, Vol. 7, Part 10. Heidelberg. 1910.
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Source: Rudolph Schuller and Charles Schuchert, “Atlantis, the ‘Lost’ Continent: A Review of Termier’s Evidence,” Geographical Review, January 1917, 61-66.
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