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Westropp has made an interesting and important disclosure of the legends of submerged lands with villages, churches, etc., all around the coasts of Ireland. In some instances they are believed to be magically visible again above the surface in certain conditions; in others the spires and walls of a fine city may at times, it is thought, be still seen through clear water. Nearly, if not quite, every one of them coincides with a shoal or bank of no great depth, the upjutting teeth of rocks, or a barren fragmentary islet—vestiges perhaps of something more conspicuous, extended, and alluring. Westropp says: “When we examine the sea bed, we see that it is not impossible (save Brasil and the land between Teelin and the Stags of Broadhaven) that islands may have existed within traditional memory at all the alleged sites.”30 In some cases considerable inroads of the ocean are perfectly well known to have occurred within relatively recent historic centuries. The same on a large scale is certainly true of Holland—witness Haarlem Lake and the Zuyder Zee. Other countries, perhaps most countries, might be called as witnesses.

In these considerations of known facts and legends still repeated we are dealing mostly with events of periods not excessively remote, but the same laws must have been at work and the same phenomena occurring in earlier millenniums.

If there were men to observe, the legend would follow the subsidence; and Phoenician or other voyagers would naturally bear it back to the Eastern Mediterranean, to Plato or the sources from which Plato derived it.

In any such case the submergence would most likely be exaggerated and made a great catastrophe, but there were special reasons why the exaggeration should be enormous in this particular story. It is the office of a myth or legend to explain. We see that in Plato’s time the Atlantic Ocean was believed, in part at least, to be no longer navigable, and with some modifications this idea persisted far down into the Middle Ages, involving at least a conviction of abnormal obstacles hardly to be overcome. The account of Critias is: “Since that time the sea in those quarters has become unnavigable; vessels cannot pass there because of the sands which extend over the site of the buried isle.” This item differs from the other features of the narration put into his mouth by Plato, in that it related to a present and continuing condition and in a way challenged investigation—which would have to be at a distant and ill-known region but was not really impracticable. It must be evident that Plato would not have written thus unless he relied on the established general repute of that part of the ocean for difficulty of navigation.