Note 67 — Chapter V · GEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS.

Although, for want of a better name, it may be admissible, when speaking either figuratively or poetically, to allude to this former region (as I have done in the above quotation) under the title of "Atlantis;" yet it seems incredible that certain writers (assuming its quondam existence) should have recently referred to it seriously as the possible "Atlantis of the ancients!" Considering that there is good reason to believe that all these islands were islands in a miocene sea, and that, if (through a general elevation) they were subsequently connected, the land of passage was broken up long anterior to the appearance of man upon the earth, "the ancients" must have assuredly merited their appellation, if they could have thrown any light on a problem which belongs to an epoch thus remote. Whether the "Atlantis" had any being at all except in the imagination of the Latin poets, or whether (as Lord Bacon has suggested) it was the New World, will probably never now be known; yet the fact that the Insulæ Fortunatæ of Juba are almost universally identified with the present Canarian Group (as indeed the accurate description of Pliny well nigh demonstrates), and the Purpurariæ with the Madeiras, ought at once, apart from geological evidence, to point out the absurdity of the hypothesis, that an Atlantic continent, in the very position which those islands occupy, could have been acknowledged to have any existence by the literature of either Rome or Greece.