In short, I fail to see why this story of Plato, told as history, derived from the Egyptians, a people who, it is known, preserved most ancient records, and who were able to trace their existence back to a vast antiquity, should have been contemptuously set aside as a fable by Greeks, Romans, and the modern world.  It can only be because our predecessors, with their limited knowledge of the geological history of the world, did not believe it possible that any large part of the earth’s surface could have been thus suddenly swallowed up by the sea.

Let us then first address ourselves to that question.

CHAPTER IV.

Was such A catastrophe possible?

All that is needed to answer this question is to briefly refer to some of the facts revealed by the study of geology.

In the first place, the earth’s surface is a record of successive risings and fallings of the land.  The accompanying picture represents a section of the anthracite coal-measures of Pennsylvania.  Each of the coal deposits here shown, indicated by the black lines, was created when the land had risen sufficiently above the sea to maintain vegetation; each of the strata of rock, many of them hundreds of feet in thickness, was deposited under water.  Here we have twenty-three different changes of the level of the land during the formation of 2000 feet of rock and coal; and these changes took place over vast areas, embracing thousands of square miles.

All the continents which now exist were, it is well understood, once, under water, and the rocks of which they are composed were deposited beneath the water; more than this, most of the rocks so deposited were the detritus or washings of other continents, which then stood where the oceans now roll, and whose mountains and plains were ground down by the action of volcanoes and earthquakes, and frost, ice, wind, and rain, and washed into the sea, to form the rocks upon which the nations now dwell; so that we have changed the conditions of land and water:  that which is now continent was once sea, and that which is now sea was formerly continent.  There can be no question that the Australian Archipelago is simply the mountain-tops of a drowned continent, which once reached from India to South America.  Science has gone so far as to even give it a name; it is called “Lemuria,” and here, it is claimed, the human race originated.  An examination of the geological formation of our Atlantic States proves beyond a doubt, from the manner in which the sedimentary rocks, the sand, gravel, and mud—­aggregating a thickness of 45,000 feet—­are deposited, that they came from the north and east.  “They represent the detritus of pre-existing lands, the washings of rain, rivers, coast-currents, and other agencies of erosion; and since the areas supplying the waste could scarcely have been of less extent than the new strata it formed, it is reasonably inferred that land