A history of atlantis must differ from all other histories, for

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THE 
HISTORY OF ATLANTIS 
CHAPTER I 
I
NTRODUCTORY
A HISTORY OF ATLANTIS must differ from all other histories, for 
the fundamental reason that it seeks to record the chronicles of a 
country the soil of which is no longer available for examination to 
the archaeologist. If, through some cataclysm of nature, the Italian 
peninsula had been submerged in the green waters of the 
Mediterranean at a period subsequent to the fall of Rome, we would 
still have been in possession of much documentary evidence 
concerning the growth and ascent of the Roman Empire. At the 
same time, the soil upon which that empire flourished, the 
ponderable remains of its civilisation and its architecture, would 
have been for ever lost to us save as regards their colonial 
manifestations. We should, in a great measure, have been forced to 
glean our ideas of Latin pre-eminence from those institutions which 
it founded in other lands, and from those traditions of it which 
remained at the era of its disappearance among the unlettered 
nations surrounding it. 
But great as would be the difficulties attending such an 
enterprise, these would, indeed, be negligible when compared with 
the task of groping through the mists of the ages in quest of the 
outlines of chronicle and event which tell of a civilisation plunged 
into the