Читать книгу Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography - William Henry Babcock - Страница 22

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Nevertheless, inquiries as to an ancient Atlantic continental mass have an interest. We may cite a few of the recent outgivings. Termier tells us of an east-and-west arrangement of elevated lands across the Atlantic in earlier ages, as opposed to the present north-and-south system of islands and raised folds. By the former there was

a very ancient continental bond between northern Europe and North America and ... another continental bond, also very ancient, between the massive Africa and South America.... Thus the region of the Atlantic, until an era of ruin which began we know not when, but the end of which was the Tertiary, was occupied by a continental mass, bounded on the south by a chain of mountains, and which was all submerged long before the collapse of those volcanic lands of which the Azores seem to be the last vestiges. In place of the South Atlantic Ocean there was, likewise, for many thousands of centuries a great continent now very deeply engulfed beneath the sea.20

Later he refers to

collapses ... at the close of the Miocene, in the folded Mediterranean zone and in the two continental areas, continuing up to the final annihilation of the two continents ... then, in the bottom of the immense maritime domain resulting from these subsidences, the appearance of a new design whose general direction is north and south.... The extreme mobility of the Atlantic region ... the certainty of the occurrence of immense depressions when islands and even continents have disappeared; the certainty that some of these depressions date as from yesterday, are of Quaternary age, and that consequently they might have been seen by man; the certainty that some of them have been sudden, or at least very rapid. See how much there is to encourage those who still hold out for Plato’s narrative. Geologically speaking, the Platonian history of Atlantis is highly probable.21