The Mud which Stopped Navigation.—­We are told by Plato, “Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea, and then that sea became inaccessible, so that navigation on it ceased, on account of the quantity of mud which the ingulfed island left in its place.”  This is one of the points of Plato’s story which provoked the incredulity and ridicule of the ancient, and even of the modern, world.  We find in the Chaldean legend something of the same kind:  Khasisatra says, “I looked at the sea attentively, observing, and the whole of humanity had returned to mud.”  In the “Popol Vuh” we are told that a “resinous thickness descended from heaven,” even as in Dominica the rain was full of “thick gray mud,” accompanied by an “overpowering smell of sulphur.”

The explorations of the ship Challenger show that the whole of the submerged ridge of which Atlantis is a part is to this day thickly covered with volcanic debris.

We have but to remember the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were covered with such a mass of volcanic ashes from the eruption of A.D. 79 that for seventeen centuries they remained buried at a depth of from fifteen to thirty feet; a new population lived and labored above them; an aqueduct was constructed over their heads; and it was only when a farmer, in digging for a well, penetrated the roof of a house, that they were once more brought to the light of day and the knowledge of mankind.

We have seen that, in 1783, the volcanic eruption in Iceland covered the sea with pumice for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, “and ships were considerably impeded in their course.”

The eruption in the island of Sumbawa, in April, 1815, threw out such masses of ashes as to darken the air.  “The floating cinders to the west of Sumatra formed, on the 12th of April, a mass two feet thick and several miles in extent, through which ships with difficulty forced their way.”

It thus appears that the very statement of Plato which has provoked the ridicule of scholars is in itself one of the corroborating features of his story.  It is probable that the ships of the Atlanteans, when they returned after the tempest to look for their country, found the sea impassable from the masses of volcanic ashes and pumice.  They returned terrified to the shores of Europe; and the shock inflicted by the destruction of Atlantis upon the civilization of the world probably led to one of those retrograde periods in the history of our race in which they lost all intercourse with the Western continent.

The Preservation of a Record.—­There is a singular coincidence in the stories of the Deluge in another particular.

The legends of the Phoenicians, preserved by Sanchoniathon, tell us that Taautos, or Taut, was the inventor of the alphabet and of the art of writing.

Now, we find in the Egyptian legends a passage of Manetho, in which Thoth (or Hermes Trismegistus), before the Deluge, inscribed on stelae, or tablets, in hieroglyphics, or sacred characters, the principles of all knowledge.  After the Deluge the second Thoth translated the contents of these stelae into the vulgar tongue.