8vo. xi, [1], 233pp. With a frontispiece and a further 15 plates. Original publisher's blind-stamped red cloth, stamped in gilt and blind. Lightly rubbed. Contemporary inked ownership inscription of Joseph Appleby dated December 1924 to browned FFEP, light spotting to initial and terminal leaves.

The first edition of a study on the origins of the lost city of Atlantis by Scottish journalist and folklorist James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence (1874-1955), founder of the Scottish National Movement and campaigner for Scottish independence. This volume, the first of six books published by Spence on the subject of the lost city, was heavily influenced by the theories of pseudoscientist Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), who posited that the legendary settlement was in fact a Bronze Age civilisation which had been destroyed in the great Biblical flood. Spence's conclusions were rejected en masse by scholars, but gained popularity among occultists and conspiracy theorists.