The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies is Sir Daniel Wilson’s last book, New York, Macmillan and Co., 1892, printed by R. & R. Clark for David Douglas, Edinburgh. His daughter Sybil wrote the preface at Toronto in August 1892, after he died over the proofs. The Atlantis study treats Plato’s island, greater than Libya and Asia and swallowed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, as a vague legend. It may mix the fall of some Iberian or western Mediterranean power with a dim report of lands farther west. It is not, for him, a mid-Atlantic continent sunk inside human history. Wyville Thomson and Lyell leave the Atlantic basin old, and the Canaries, Madeiras, and Azores are not fragments of a lost land. He sets Brasseur’s eastward extension of America, and Donnelly’s popular book, aside as science ignored.
The real pre-Columbian contact he accepts is the Northmen in Greenland and on the mainland before the close of the tenth century. America, he argues, was peopled from Asia by the Pacific islands, by an Atlantic island-chain to the Antilles and Brazil, and latest by Behring Strait. Language favors the Pacific over the route Atlantis would imply. Maya civilization in Central America may be native. Until a genuine Phoenician or other inscription appears there, the legend remains a myth. The other seven studies take up Vinland, Stone Age trade, the northern hunter, native art, the Huron-Iroquois, race mixture, and brain weight.