Atlantis : the ,,entedituvian World. By Ignatius, Donnelly.
(Sampson Low and Co.)—This is one of the queerest books of the sancta simplicitas order that ever were written. Mr. Donnelly has manifestly dipped into all sorts of writers, Plato and Pliny and Diodorus Siculus, Professor Max Midler and Mr. Tyler, Lopsius and Lenormant, Darwin and Lyell. And yet all to what baseless uses !—to prove that Plato's Atlantis is a sober history, and that a submerged continent in the middle of the Atlantic, of which evidences are yet to be found in the Azores and the Dolphin's Ridge, was the original home of the races of the world ; was Eden, the Elysian Fields, Mesomphalos, the Garden of the Hesperides, Asgard ! Mr. Donnelly is manifestly unaware that his whole theory has been knocked on the head by the one fact—not to mention others—that the Azores do not in their flora or fauna give any evidences of having once been por- tion of a continent, but are distinctly oceanic in all scientific characteristics. Much amusement may, however, be obtained out of the collection of facts which Mr. Donnelly has arranged in so pecu- liar a fashion. Thus among the evidences—very remarkable these are, in any case—brought forward to show that in prehistoric days there had been (of course, by way of Atlantis, in Mr. Donnelly's opinion) communications between Asia and Europe on the one side and America on the other, is a portrait of Savonarola. "It looks," says our author, "more like the hunting Indians of North-Western America than the faces (previously given). In fact, if it wee dressed with a scalp-lock, it would pass muster anywhere as a portrait of the Man-afraid.of-his-Horses,' or 'Sitting Bull' I"
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