1.  Lenormant insists that the human race issued from Ups Merou, and adds that some Greek traditions point to “this locality—­particularly the expression me’ropes a?’newpoi, which can only mean ’the men sprung from Merou.’” ("Manual,” p.21.)

Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the Meropes, the people of Merou.

2.  Whence comes the word Atlantic?  The dictionaries tell us that the ocean is named after the mountains of Atlas; but whence did the Atlas mountains get their name?

“The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe.  They are not Greek, and cannot be referred to any known language of the Old World.  But in the Nahuatl language we find immediately the radical a, atl, which signifies water, war, and the top of the head. (Molina, “Vocab. en lengua Mexicana y Castellana.”) From this comes a series of words, such as atlan—­on the border of or amid the water—­from which we ’have the adjective Atlantic.  We have also atlaca, to combat, or be in agony; it means likewise to hurl or dart from the water, and in the preterit makes Atlaz.  A city named Atlan existed when the continent was discovered by Columbus, at the entrance of the Gulf of Uraba, in Darien.  With a good harbor, it is now reduced to an unimportant pueblo named Acla.” (Baldwin’s “Ancient America,” p. 179.)

Plato tells us that Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean were named after Atlas, the eldest son of Poseidon, the founder of the kingdom.

3.  Upon that part of the African continent nearest to the site of Atlantis we find a chain of mountains, known from the most ancient times as the Atlas Mountains.  Whence this name Atlas, if it be not from the name of the great king of Atlantis?  And if this be not its origin, how comes it that we find it in the most north-western corner of Africa?  And how does it happen that in the time of Herodotus there dwelt near this mountain-chain a people called the Atlantes, probably a remnant of a colony from Solon’s island?  How comes it that the people of the Barbary States were known to the Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians as the “Atlantes,” this name being especially applied to the inhabitants of Fezzan and Bilma?  Where did they get the name from?  There is no etymology for it east of the Atlantic Ocean. (Lenormants “Anc.  Hist. of the East,” p. 253.)

Look at it!  An “Atlas” mountain on the shore of Africa; an “Atlan” town on the shore of America; the “Atlantes” living along the north and west coast of Africa; an Aztec people from Aztlan, in Central America; an ocean rolling between the two worlds called the “Atlantic;” a mythological deity called “Atlas” holding the world on his shoulders; and an immemorial tradition of an island of Atlantis.  Can all these things be the result of accident?

4.  Plato says that there was a “passage west from Atlantis to the rest of the islands, as well as from these islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds that real sea.”  He calls it a real sea, as contradistinguished from the Mediterranean, which, as he says, is not a real sea (or ocean) but a landlocked body of water, like a harbor.