These few writers pretty well represent the opinions of their numerous contemporaries who, though they wrote voluminously enough on this subject, added nothing to what we have noted. The opinions of modern writers are as diverse as those of Garcia, and only surpass him in the ingenuity with which they press their favorite theories. Very little has been done in this field with a true scientific spirit. Each has been an advocate rather than an inquirer; has had his theory to prove sometimes at the expense of reason and fact, and it is remarkable that the majority of works written by such advocates have presented the familiar anomaly of more learning than of probability. It is scarcely the province of this work to discuss these well-known productions of imaginative and too often credulous writers. To more than refer to them would be to lose sight for the time of the object before us. The claims for the Pre-Columbian colonization of this continent of course include most of those already mentioned, and properly are of two classes: First, those which fix the period of colonization remote enough to account for the old civilization or some phases of it. Second, those which avowedly are too recent to have accomplished that civilization. Of the first-named class there are about a dozen thoroughly elaborated claims, while of the second there are less than half that number. Mr. Warden years ago treated them all in a manner and with a fullness which has not been excelled by any more recent writer.[179] Though it is due to Mr. Bancroft to say that never before has the subject been so exhaustively handled in our own language as by him.[180] As nothing new has been developed in this field of speculation since Mr. Bancroft, and we might add since Mr. Warden treated it, and as nothing could be contributed either to the sciences of ethnology or archæology by a repetition of the old discussion here, for we have our doubts whether any of the claims can ever be substantiated at all, we will content ourselves with the simple enumeration of the theories. A theory which rivals in antiquity, if Egyptian chronology is reliable, the claims of the Fathers that the immediate descendants of Noah peopled the new world shortly after the deluge, is that which seeks to establish the truth of the tradition told to Solon by the Egyptian priests of Psenophis, Sonchis, Heliopolis and Sais concerning the ancient island Atlantis. Critias, whose grandfather had heard the tradition from Solon, communicated it to Socrates. Plato first committed it to writing, and states that the events which it described occurred nine thousand Egyptian years before Solon heard it. After speaking of the “Atlantic Sea,” the priest adds “that sea was indeed navigable, and had an island fronting that mouth which you call the Pillars of Hercules; and this island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and there was a passage hence for travellers of that day to the rest of the islands, as well as from