Iron County News

December 10, 1921

“Mystery of Lost Atlantis.”

Believed by Many to Be Merely Legend, but Idea Can Not Be Entirely Uprooted.

Will the mystery of “lost Atlantis” ever be solved to general satisfaction?

The story has been told for centuries, and is still accepted as true by numbers of people on both sides of the Atlantic.

The original idea was that an island of immense size and great beauty existed beyond Africa, with many large cities, and nations having strange laws and customs. Some writers have even gone so far as to describe the kind of clothing the people wore and the money they used.

Then the story goes that the inhabitants of this great island of Atlantis grew bold and warlike, and that they invaded Europe and Africa. But fate was unkind to them - because of their wickedness, it is said; terrible earthquakes and floods occurred, and in a single day and night Atlantis was swallowed up and sank into the depths of the Atlantic ocean.

In the attempt to find some ground for persistent belief, one famous scientist fell back upon the time, thousands of years ago, when great tracts of the earth were covered with a sheet of ice of vast thickness.

In this ice were imprisoned such enormous quantities of water that the level of the oceans sank quite low, with the result that large areas of land were left uncovered. One of these uncovered portions, he suggested, was the island or continent of Atlantis, which, on the melting of the ice, was covered again by water to a great depth.

The western mountains of Europe and the eastern mountains of North America are supposed to be fragments of the high mountain ranges of this mysterious “lost Atlantis.”

“Historic Oddity Headlines” showcases actual articles written about truly odd occurrences that took place and were published within United States newspapers back in the 1800s-1900s. The articles posted here are written exactly as they appeared during their original publishing date.

-The Pine Barrens Institute

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