M. Bailly’s letters of 1779 continue his letters on the origin of the sciences, addressed to M. de Voltaire. The title page prints M. Bailly. A hand has written Jean Sylvain above that name. He treats the Brahmins as depositaries of philosophy and the sciences, and he treats Plato’s island Atlantis as a tradition the philosopher did not invent. The search beyond the strait of Gibraltar was, for him, a search led by later monuments.
His own place for the people is the North. He puts the Hyperboreans on an island of the frozen sea, the route of their offerings through Tartary between the Caucasus and that sea, and the Phoenicians as Atlantes under another name, come down from the Caucasus. In the last letter an ancient habitation in Spitzberg, Greenland, and Nova Zembla is a strange conclusion, and a footnote says the island opposite Plato’s mouth must be Nova Zembla. He had earlier stopped at the 49th degree of latitude. Oguz stands at 2824 years before our era.