or was immediately connected
with it. They hold that the human race first rose to civilized life in
America, which is, geologically, the oldest of the continents; and that,
ages ago, the portion of this continent on which the first civilizers
appeared was sunk beneath the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Usually the
ingulfing of this portion of the land is supposed to have been effected
by some tremendous convulsion of nature; and there is appeal to
recollections of such a catastrophe, said to have been preserved in the
old books of Central America, and also in those of Egypt, from which
Solon received an account of the lost Atlantis.

According to this hypothesis, the American continent formerly extended
from Mexico, Central America, and New Granada far into the Atlantic
Ocean toward Europe and Africa, covering all the space now occupied by
the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the West India islands, and
going far beyond them toward the east and northeast. This lost portion
of the continent was the Atlantis of which the old annals of Egypt told
so much in the time of Solon, as we learn from Plato; and it was the
original seat of the first human civilization, which, after the great
cataclysm, was renewed and perpetuated in the region where we now trace
the mysterious remains of ancient cities. Those desiring to know what
can be said in support of this view of Ancient America must read the
later volumes of Brasseur de Bourbourg, especially his "Quatre Lettres
sur le Mexique," and his "Sources de l'Histoire Primitive du Mexique,"
etc. He is not a perspicuous writer; he uses but little system in
treating the subject, and he introduces many fanciful speculations which
do more to embarrass than to help the discussion; but those who read
the books patiently can find and bring together all that relates to the
point in question, and consider it in their own way. They can also find
it set forth and defended in a small volume by George Catlin, entitled
"The Lifted and Subsided Rocks of America," published in London, not
long since, by Truebner and Company.

I shall give more attention to this theory in the next chapter. I refer
to it here on account of the very great antiquity it claims for the
ancient American civilization. It represents that the advanced human
development whose crumbling monuments are studied at Copan, Mitla, and
Palenque antedates every thing else in the human period of our globe,
excepting, perhaps, an ea