those islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds the real sea. For as respects what is within the mouth here mentioned, it appears to be a bay with a kind of narrow entrance, and that sea is indeed a true sea, and the land that entirely surrounds it may truly and most correctly be called a continent.” The priest concludes his account with the statement that an earthquake in a single night buried the entire island and its inhabitants. This mysterious island has been sought for in every quarter of the globe; but the fact that part of the description seems applicable to the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, has led theorists to place its submerged shores between that locality and the Cape Verde or Canary groups. It is claimed that this imaginary land bridge, this backbone of earth and rock, may have once been the connecting link between the two continents. The claim has had many champions, but none so celebrated as the lamented Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg. The labors of this learned Américaniste are too well known to require comment.[181] The Codex Chimalpopoca, a Nahua MS. of anonymous authorship, which served the Abbé as the chief authority for the Toltec Period of his _Histoire des Nations Civilisées_, is the basis upon which he rests the advocacy of his “Atlantic Theory.” This singular Codex, which appears to the eyes of the uninitiated to be only “A History of the Kingdoms of Culhuacan and Mexico,” he considers susceptible of an allegorical interpretation, in which he reads the history and fate of that first of the continents, on whose soil originated all civilization and whose inhabitants were the genii of the arts, the origin of which are without even a tradition.[182]