But it is an easy, as well as a pleasant pastime, to evolve either a camel or a continent out of the depths of one’s own inner consciousness. To such fanciful speculators, the lost Atlantis will ever offer a tempting basis on which to found their unsubstantial creations. Mr. H. H. Bancroft, when alluding to the subject in his _Native Races of the Pacific States_, refers to forty-two different works for notices and speculations concerning Atlantis. The latest advocacy of the idea of an actual island-continent of the mid-Atlantic, literally engulfed in the ocean, within a period authentically embraced by historical tradition, is to be found in its most popular form in Mr. Ignatius Donnelly’s _Atlantis, the Antediluvian World_. By him, as by Abbé Brasseur, the concurrent opinions of the highest authorities in science, that the main features of the Atlantic basin have undergone no change within any recent geological period, are wholly ignored. To those, therefore, who attach any value to scientific evidence, such speculations present no serious claims on their study. There is, indeed, an idea favoured by certain students of science, who carry the spirit of nationality into regions ordinarily regarded as lying outside of any sectional pride, that, geologically speaking, America is the older continent. It may at least be accepted as beyond dispute, that that continent and the great Atlantic basin intervening between it and Europe are alike of a geological antiquity which places the age of either entirely apart from all speculations affecting human history. But such fancies are wholly superfluous. The idea of intercourse between the Old and the New World prior to the fifteenth century, passed from the region of speculation to the domain of historical fact, when the publication of the _Antiquitates Americanæ_ and the _Grönland’s Historiske Mindesmærker_, by the antiquaries of Copenhagen, adduced contemporary authorities, and indisputably genuine runic inscriptions, in proof of the visits of the Northmen to Greenland and the mainland of North America, before the close of the tenth century.