But it is at that point of the European coast nearest to the site of Atlantis at Lisbon that the most tremendous earthquake of modern times has occurred.  On the 1st of November, 1775, a sound of thunder was heard underground, and immediately afterward a violent shock threw down the greater part of the city.  In six minutes 60,000 persons perished.  A great concourse of people had collected for safety upon a new quay, built entirely of marble; but suddenly it sunk down with all the people on it, and not one of the dead bodies ever floated to the surface.  A great number of small boats and vessels anchored near it, and, full of people, were swallowed up as in a whirlpool.  No fragments of these wrecks ever rose again to the surface; the water where the quay went down is now 600 feet deep.  The area covered by this earthquake was very great.  Humboldt says that a portion of the earth’s surface, four times as great as the size of Europe, was simultaneously shaken.  It extended from the Baltic to the West Indies, and from Canada to Algiers.  At eight leagues from Morocco the ground opened and swallowed a village of 10,000 inhabitants, and closed again over them.

It is very probable that the centre of the convulsion was in the bed of the Atlantic, at or near the buried island of Atlantis, and that it was a successor of the great earth throe which, thousands of years before, had brought destruction upon that land.

Eruptionof Vesuvius in 1737.

Ireland also lies near the axis of this great volcanic area, reaching from the Canaries to Iceland, and it has been many times in the past the seat of disturbance.  The ancient annals contain numerous accounts of eruptions, preceded by volcanic action.  In 1490, at the Ox Mountains, Sligo, one occurred by which one hundred persons and numbers of cattle were destroyed; and a volcanic eruption in May, 1788, on the hill of Knocklade, Antrim, poured a stream of lava sixty yards wide for thirty-nine hours, and destroyed the village of Ballyowen and all the inhabitants, save a man and his wife and two children. ("Amer.  Cyclop.,” art.  Ireland.)

While we find Lisbon and Ireland, east of Atlantis, subjected to these great earthquake shocks, the West India Islands, west of the same centre, have been repeatedly visited in a similar manner.  In 1692 Jamaica suffered from a violent earthquake.  The earth opened, and great quantities of water were cast out; many people were swallowed up in these rents; the earth caught some of them by the middle and squeezed them to death; the heads of others only appeared above-ground.  A tract of land near the town of Port Royal, about a thousand acres in extent, sunk down in less than one minute, and the sea immediately rolled in.

The Azore Islands are undoubtedly the peaks of the mountains of Atlantis.  They are even yet the centre of great volcanic activity.  They have suffered severely from eruptions and earthquakes.  In 1808 a volcano rose suddenly in San Jorge to the height of 3500 feet, and burnt for six days, desolating the entire island.  In 1811 a volcano rose from the sea, near San Miguel, creating an island 300 feet high, which was named Sambrina, but which soon sunk beneath the sea.  Similar volcanic eruptions occurred in the Azores in 1691 and 1720.