vealed the half-circle of the continent from Newfoundland to Cape St. Roche, how could Plato have guessed it? And how could he have known that the Mediterranean was only a harbor compared with the magnitude of the great ocean surrounding Atlantis? Long sea-voyages were necessary to establish that fact, and the Greeks, who kept close to the shores in their short journeys, did not make such voyages.
5. How can we, without Atlantis, explain the presence of the Basques in Europe, who have no lingual affinities with any other race on the continent of Europe, but whose language is similar to the languages of America?
Plato tells us that the dominion of Gadeirus, one of the kings of Atlantis, extended "toward the pillars of Heracles (Hercules) as far as the country which is still called the region of Gades in that part of the world." Gades is the Cadiz of to-day, and the dominion of Gadeirus embraced the land of the Iberians or Basques, their chief city taking its name from a king of Atlantis, and they themselves being Atlanteans.
Dr. Farrar, referring to the Basque language, says:
"What is certain about it is, that its structure is polysynthetic, like the languages of America. Like them, it forms its compounds by the elimination of certain radicals in the simple words; so that ilhun, the twilight, is contracted from hill, dead, and egun, day; and belhaur, the knee, from belhar, front, and oin, leg.… The fact is indisputable, and is eminently noteworthy, that while the affinities of the Basque roots have never been conclusively elucidated, there has never been any doubt that this isolated language, preserving its identity in a western corner of Europe, between two mighty kingdoms, resembles, in its grammatical structure, the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent (America), and those alone." ("Families of Speech," p. 132.)
If there was an Atlantis, forming, with its connecting ridges, a continuous bridge of land from America to Africa, we can understand how the Basques could have passed from one continent to another; but if the wide Atlantic rolled at all times un-
