Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon et sur l’ancienne histoire de l’Asie (1779)

I read M. Bailly’s Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon et sur l’ancienne histoire de l’Asie for the names, dates, and places a later writer can set beside Timaeus and Critias and beside The History of Atlantis. The title page prints the title in capitals, then an italic line: these letters serve as a sequel to the Lettres sur l’origine des Sciences, addressed to M. de Voltaire by M. Bailly. The printed name is M. BAILLY. A hand has written Jean Sylvain above that surname. I use the printed name in the cites below. The imprint is London, at M. Elmsly, and Paris, at the brothers Debure, Quai des Augustins. The price line reads 3 livres 12 sols, sewn. The year is M. DCC. LXXIX, that is 1779. The book is out of copyright. Under a date, a place, or an event I put one short French sentence I have read on the page, then the English sense of that sentence. I am not comparing him with other Atlantis books in this review. He does not name Mu or Lemuria. Where the text speaks of Lemures, it means the Roman spirits of the wicked, not a Pacific continent.

This volume does not open at a first letter. It continues the earlier correspondence. Voltaire’s fourth letter comes first. Bailly’s own letters here run from the eleventh to the twenty-fourth. Letters 1 to 3 and 5 to 10 are not in this copy.

The scan has 436 file pages. Printed numbers sit in the running head, and they do not stay a fixed distance from the file page. File page 14 is printed 2, file page 21 is printed 9, file page 37 is printed 25, file page 82 is printed 76, file page 179 is printed 179, file page 348 is printed 356, file page 393 is printed 403, and the table’s second leaf, file page 433, is printed 443. I cite the printed number when I have seen it on that leaf. The avertissement (file page 11), the opening of Voltaire’s letter (file page 13), and the note for the map (file page 434) have no printed number.

The book at a glance

• Title: Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon et sur l’ancienne histoire de l’Asie. The italic line says the book continues the letters on the origin of the sciences, addressed to M. de Voltaire by M. Bailly.
• Author as printed: M. Bailly. Jean Sylvain is handwritten above the surname.
• Edition I read: A Londres, chez M. Elmsly, et à Paris, chez les frères Debure, Quai des Augustins, M. DCC. LXXIX. Price 3 livres 12 sols, sewn.
• Length: 436 file pages. The table is headed 443. The letters in this volume are Voltaire’s fourth, then Bailly’s eleventh through twenty-fourth, with an avertissement, a table, and a note for a map.
• What he claims: The Brahmins were depositaries of philosophy and the sciences, where Voltaire had taken them for the authors. Plato did not invent the substance of the island Atlantis, and the details are not his work either. The search beyond the strait of Gibraltar was led by later monuments. The people of that story have their homeland in the North. 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.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The letters were written before Voltaire’s death and had not yet been sent to him. Voltaire had always held that the Brahmins were the authors of philosophy and the sciences. Bailly thinks they were only depositaries. File page 11.
• Voltaire dates his fourth letter from Ferney, 27 February 1777. He puts the book of the Shastah at nearly 5000 years, and he names M. Holwell and M. d’Ow as the men who learned the sacred language at Benares. Printed p. 2.
• Bailly dates the eleventh letter from Paris, 16 January 1778. Plato is the first witness he calls. The priests tell the Greeks of the finest generation of men, of which only a weak seed escaped, and of a great power which came out of the Atlantic sea and invaded Europe and Asia. Printed pp. 9 and 19.
• Facts can be true in themselves and false as to the place where one supposes they happened. The priest at Sais gives facts of 8 to 9000 years as facts of Egypt, and yet begins with the island Atlantis. Bailly reads that as a formal admission that the Egyptians drew their origin from the island whose memory Plato preserved. Printed pp. 29 and 30.
• The twelfth letter is dated Paris, 28 February 1778. Its title says the tale of the island Atlantis is not a fiction. The chain runs from the priests of Egypt through Solon, Dropidas, and Critias the grandfather, aged ninety, to Plato, still a child. Printed p. 25.
• Plato did not invent the substance, and the details are not his work either. The ten chiefs meet every five or six years in the temple of Neptune, with the same regard for even number and odd. Homer, six centuries earlier, spoke in the Odyssey of the Atlantes and their island. Printed pp. 42 and 43.
• The fourteenth letter is dated Paris, 18 March 1778, and is headed 76. The table prints 87 for the same letter. Two mountains, Calpé and Abila, and two columns in the temple of Hercules at Cadiz, fixed the modern search at the strait of Gibraltar. Plato’s island is given as 3000 stades by 2000, about 150 leagues by 100, almost the extent of France. Printed pp. 76 and 77.
• The fifteenth letter is dated Paris, 21 March 1778. Some moderns went to the west of Africa and crossed to America with Columbus. M. Baer takes Judea for Plato’s Atlantis. Bailly says the country between the Euphrates and the sea is not an island, and Palestine is not the end of the search. Printed pp. 98 and 102.
• The sixteenth letter is dated Paris, 26 March 1778. Before Adam, God created the Dives and gave them the world for seven thousand years. The Peris followed for two thousand years more. Printed p. 132.
• The eighteenth letter is dated Paris, 2 April 1778. The mountains of the Peris, and the mountains beyond which the Dives were set apart, are Caf and Damavend. Damavend was a town of Adherbigian, or ancient Media, at 37 degrees, at the foot of a chain that joins the Caucasus. The mountains of Caf are the Caucasus itself. Printed p. 179.
• The twentieth letter is dated Paris, 12 April 1778. Abolghazi, a khan of the Usbecks, reigned in the last century at Karasm, on the Caspian, and wrote the history of his nation. With Oguz a continuous chronology begins. Four thousand years passed between Oguz and Gingiskan. Oguz is placed 2824 years before our era. Bailly’s estimate of the Tartar cycles, in his history of ancient astronomy, was 2924 years before Christ. Printed pp. 240 and 244.
• The twenty-first letter is dated Paris, 20 April 1778. He puts the garden of the Hesperides near the pole. Printed pp. 271 and 308.
• The twenty-third letter is dated Paris, 5 May 1778. Pausanias’s route of the Hyperborean offerings runs through the Arimaspes, the Issedons, and the Scythians, peoples of Tartary between the Caucasus and the frozen sea. Diodorus placed the Hyperboreans toward the north, on an island of that sea. The Chinese Peirun and the Swedish Belgemer were each saved from an inundation in a boat. Plutarch’s four islands may be Iceland, Greenland, Spitzberg, and Nova Zembla. Printed pp. 356, 358, 366, and 384.
• The twenty-fourth letter is dated Paris, 12 May 1778. An ancient habitation in Spitzberg, Greenland, and Nova Zembla is a strange conclusion. In the first letters he had not gone above the 49th degree. He inclines to name the earlier people from Magog, at the latitude of 49. The Atlantes, under Bacchus or Osiris, force the passage and destroy a great empire. A footnote says the island opposite the mouth must be Nova Zembla. Printed pp. 404, 427, 434, and 435.
• The map note lists Issedones, Arimaspes, Hyperboreans, Massagetae, and Amazons from a map drawn after Herodotus, and the country of the Tschoudes from the voyage of M. Pallas. The coasts are copied from M. Danville’s map of Asia. The page prints Danville, not a longer form of the name. File page 434.

Avertissement

The avertissement occupies file pages 11 and 12 and has no printed number. The letters were written before the death of the great man just lost, and they had not yet been communicated to him. They were meant to develop an opinion which has a great likelihood, and which perhaps, under the look of a paradox, holds a great fund of truth. They were not meant to convince M. de Voltaire. One does not change one’s opinions at 85.

Ces Lettres ont été écrites avant la mort du grand homme que nous venons de perdre; elles ne lui avoient point encore été communiquées.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), file p. 11

These letters were written before the death of the great man we have just lost. They had not yet been communicated to him.

The dispute of the whole book is stated on the same page. Voltaire had always been persuaded that the Brahmins, who taught us so many things, were the authors of philosophy and the sciences. The author thinks they were only depositaries.

Il a toujours été persuadé que les Brames, qui nous ont enseigné tant de choses, étoient les auteurs de la philosophie & des sciences; l'auteur pense qu'ils n'en ont été que dépositaires.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), file p. 11

He had always been persuaded that the Brahmins, who taught us so many things, were the authors of philosophy and the sciences. The author thinks they were only the keepers of them.

Voltaire’s death did not have to change the form of discussion used in the first letters. On the next file page the author still has the honor of speaking to M. de Voltaire. This avertissement names no island and no flood.

Quatrième lettre

The fourth letter is from M. de Voltaire to M. Bailly. The leaf, file page 13, repeats the book title, then the heading. It has an ornament and the signature A, and no printed numeral. The table calls this page 1. The dateline is Ferney, 27 February 1777. Under it stands Tradidit mundum disputationi eorum.

A Ferney, le 27 Février 1777.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), file p. 13

At Ferney, 27 February 1777.

Je ne dispute point contre vous, je ne cherche qu'à m'instruire.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), file p. 13

I am not disputing with you. I am only trying to learn.

The next words call the writer an old blind man asking for the road. On the page headed 2 he is astonished that none of the French has had the curiosity to learn the ancient sacred language at Benares, as M. Holwell and M. d’Ow have done. The first numbered doubt is the book of the Shastah, written nearly 5000 years ago, not sublime enough to let one believe that the authors had genius and science.

Le livre du Shastah, écrit il y a près de 5000 ans, n'est pas assez sublime pour nous laisser croire que les auteurs avaient du génie & de la science.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 2

The book of the Shastah, written nearly 5000 years ago, is not sublime enough to let us believe that the authors had genius and science.

Bailly’s footnote on the same page answers that doubt. The book of the Shastah is full of fables, but it begins with the great truth that God is incomprehensible and that man must not found God’s essence. That truth, when it has not been revealed, can only have been the work of philosophy. He finds in the three gods of the Indians the three acts of the divine power, which produced the world, preserves it, and is to destroy it. If fables follow those views, the Indians added the fables. The people who created the fables did not create these truths. The footnote points to the first letters to M. de Voltaire, p. 75. The second numbered doubt begins at the foot of the page and is unfinished there. This letter places no Atlantic island and describes no flood. It fixes the quarrel the rest of the book answers: inventors, or depositaries.

Onzième lettre

The eleventh letter is from M. Bailly to M. de Voltaire. The running head is printed 9. The subtitle is an exposition of the subject of these new letters, and a first example of a lost people. The dateline is Paris, 16 January 1778. The table gives the same page, 9.

A Paris, ce 16 Janvier 1778.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 9

At Paris, 16 January 1778.

Quelque prévenu que vous soyez en faveur des Bracmanes, je vous fais encore juge entre ces sages si justement admirés, & le peuple plus savant, mais inconnu, que vous ne voulez pas admettre.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 9

However prepossessed you are in favor of the Brahmins, I still make you the judge between those sages, so justly admired, and the more learned but unknown people which you will not admit.

He says Voltaire has conversed, through Pythagoras, with the sages who instructed that philosopher, and has read their books. The Brahmins Voltaire loves are young beside their ancient instructors. Before Hipparchus and Ptolemy, the sciences show great isolated truths, remains of a mass of knowledge destroyed and scattered. Those sciences were not, in his view, the work of the peoples of Asia who are known, and the inventions have to be carried back to an earlier and more industrious people. He says he has given the proofs in the history of ancient astronomy, and multiplied them in the history of modern astronomy, which he is about to publish.

On the page headed 19 he calls the witnesses. Plato is the first. Plato had consulted the sages of Egypt, and it is they who instruct the Greeks through his mouth. The footnote names Plato in his Timée.

Vous ne savez pas, disent-ils, quelle était dans votre pays la plus belle & la meilleure génération d'hommes qui ait jamais existé; il n'en est échappé qu'une faible semence dont vous êtes les descendans.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 19

You do not know, they say, what the finest and best generation of men that ever existed was in your country. Only a weak seed of it escaped, and you are the descendants of that seed.

The same speech says their writings report how the republic resisted a great power which, come out of the Atlantic sea, had unjustly invaded all Europe and Asia. Bailly then calls this an ancient race of men almost entirely destroyed, because Plato does not dissimulate that the Greeks were only a weak remnant. He warns against the expressions of philosophical writers: in their tales, each pencil stroke is an idea. The beautiful, as he reads Plato, is instruction, and the best is virtue. The power opposed to the people who resisted is a nation come out of the Atlantic sea. That irruption is a great event. One does not invade Europe and Asia without a revolution on the globe. He sets deluges of waters, of fires, and of men as things that spread over the earth only to ravage it. The Atlantic people, and the people who resisted them, are lost for the time, because one does not know in which centuries to place them, and lost for the place, because Atlantis itself has disappeared. The twelfth letter begins on the page headed 25.

Douzième lettre

The twelfth letter is addressed to M. de Voltaire. The running head is printed 25. The italic title says the tale of the island Atlantis is not a fiction. The dateline is Paris, 28 February 1778.

Récit de l'île Atlantide: ce n'est pas une fiction.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 25

Tale of the island Atlantis: it is not a fiction.

The history is told in two dialogues, one titled Timée and the other Critias. Plato, still a child, listened to his grandfather Critias, aged ninety. That Critias in his youth had been taught by Solon, the friend of his father Dropidas. Solon was the legislator of Athens and one of the seven sages of Greece. One cannot point to a more venerable source. The page ends on the sentence that this is how the philosopher transmitted the instructions of the priests of Egypt.

He then distinguishes two ways a people moves. An irruption and a conquest are a devouring fire. Men always armed bring neither books nor memoirs, and they care little for the past. A nation that changes its home in a body, or by colonies only, can carry its institutions, its knowledge, and the memory of its ancestors. The history of the first state always preceded the history of the second. In time the two histories become one. The working rule is on the page headed 29.

Voilà comment des faits, vrais en eux-mêmes, deviennent faux relativement aux lieux où on suppose qu'ils sont arrivés.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 29

That is how facts which are true in themselves become false relative to the places where one supposes they happened.

The heroic times of Greece, the times of which she boasts, do not belong to her. They are the first history of the people who came to inhabit her. The Egyptian priest declares that he speaks from memoirs kept at Sais in lower Egypt. The sentence breaks at “facts of 8” and continues on the next page, headed 30, with “to 9000 years.” Those facts are given as facts of the country itself, and yet he begins with the history of the island Atlantis, which was certainly not in Egypt.

Cette association des faits étrangers & des faits propres à l'Egypte est donc une preuve positive de ce que je viens d'établir; & en même tems c'est un aveu formel que les Egyptiens tiraient leur origine de cette île, dont Platon nous a conservé la mémoire, & qu'il a rendue célèbre.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 30

This joining of foreign facts and of facts proper to Egypt is therefore a positive proof of what he has just established, and at the same time a formal admission that the Egyptians drew their origin from this island, whose memory Plato preserved for us and which he made famous.

A footnote names the dialogue of Timée. The priest’s narrative, still on that page, says the memoirs report how the republic resisted a great power which, coming out of the Atlantic sea, had unjustly invaded all Europe and Asia. That sea was then fordable. On its shores was an island opposite the mouth which in their language they call the columns of Hercules, and the island was larger than Libya. The sentence breaks at the syllable Li. The next leaf carries it on: larger than Libya and Asia together. In that island there were kings whose power was very great. It extended over the whole island, over several others, and over parts of the continent. They reigned, on one side, over all the countries from Libya to Egypt, and, on the side of Europe, as far as Tyrrhenia. The pride of their united forces tried to subdue the Athenian country, the Egyptian country, and all the provinces on this side of the columns of Hercules, where their irruption began. The republic showed itself superior to all mortals by force and by virtue, triumphed, raised trophies, and gave safety and liberty. Then, in the last times, there came tremblings of the globe and inundations. All the warriors were swallowed by the earth in the space of a day and a night. The island Atlantis disappeared into the sea. The sea there is neither navigable nor known, because a mud has formed little by little from that submerged island. The footnote names Plato’s dialogue of Timée.

Plato takes up the same subject, with more detail, in Critias. He goes back to the moment when the gods are supposed to have shared the earth in order to cultivate and embellish it. The island Atlantis was Neptune’s lot. On a small mountain he found a single man, named Evenor, and his wife Leucippe. They had been born of the earth, as the ancients supposed of those whose origin they did not know. Their only daughter was Clito. Neptune loved her and married her. He had five couples of male twins. He divided his domain into ten parts. The eldest was called Atlas and afterwards gave his name to the whole island. He had as his share the center of the island and the small mountain where his ancestors had lived. Bailly conjectures that the mountain too was named Atlas.

The posterity of Atlas reigned a long time with glory. The kingdom passed to the eldest. The children of that race kept the scepter for many generations. The island was rich in metals, solid and fusible. It produced orichalcum, a metal known in Plato’s own time only by name, abundant in the mines of the island, and the most precious after gold. The forests gave every kind of building timber. The earth nourished many animals, tame and wild, and there was a great number of elephants. Bailly shortens the advantages of the island, which Plato calls fertile, beautiful, holy, and marvellous, and he shortens the magnificence of its kings. He will not speak of the palace, nor of the temple of Neptune, whose vaults were of carved ivory and whose pavement was of silver and orichalcum, nor of the golden statues, the god in a chariot drawn by six winged horses, surrounded by a hundred Nereids seated on dolphins. Around them stood the statues of all the kings who had succeeded Atlas and his brothers. The priests of Egypt, careful to keep ancient usages, likewise showed Herodotus the statues of the kings who had reigned over them. Bridges, aqueducts, baths, gymnasiums, and hippodromes are enough, he says, to announce a powerful and civilized nation.

The island’s figure was an oblong square. Its length from one end to the other, and its breadth, are given in stades on that leaf. I am not copying those figures from the text layer, because the print is broken there. The measure I will keep is the one I read later, on the page headed 77: 3000 stades by 2000. The territory extended toward the south, and on the north it was bordered by mountains, which surpassed in number, size, and beauty all those known in Plato’s time. They were covered with villages and rich dwellings, and they abounded in forests, rivers, lakes, and meadows. The surface had been disposed thus by nature and worked by many generations over a long course of time.

Each of the ten chiefs reigned in his district and in his cities, over his subjects and according to his laws. This society of empires, quite like the government of the Amphictyons in Greece, was established by a precise order of Neptune, expressed in a respected law and engraved on a column in his temple. In that temple the ten chiefs assembled alternately every five or six years, with the same regard for even number and for odd. Before judging, they gave one another their faith in the most solemn manner. Alone before the god, they sacrificed a bull, filled a vase with its blood, poured a drop on each of them, threw a part into the fire, and swore that they would judge according to the law written on the column and punish the first who transgressed it. They finished by drinking of that blood, each making imprecations on himself and on his family. For a long time these peoples were religious and wise. They obeyed the laws. They despised everything except virtue, and they regarded wealth as a burden. Sobriety, reciprocal union, and virtue were the true enjoyment.

The objection he answers is that this people is the fruit of Plato’s imagination. On the page headed 42 he says Plato understood picturesque order too well to hide the subject in a corner and enlarge only the accessories.

Non-seulement Platon n'a pas inventé le fond des choses, mais les détails ne sont point non plus son ouvrage.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 42

Plato not only did not invent the substance of the things. The details are not his work either.

He left on it the stamp of truth. He would have put his own stamp on it, if it had been a lie. The proof in the next sentence is the indifference of the ten chiefs to even and odd number. Plato, who built the world with the five regular bodies of geometry, and who founded divine perfection and human generation on the number three, would not have given a people of his own making this indifference. The sentence runs off the page onto the leaf headed 43, where antiquity is always on its knees before the odd number. Writers, like painters, have parasite ideas that belong to their manner. He names the Bassan: the dog is missing here, and the picture is not by Bassan.

On the same page the tale of Plato has every character of truth. It is not a fiction to amuse and instruct his readers. The proof that Plato recounted and did not imagine is that Homer, come six centuries before him, versed in the knowledge of geography and of foreign customs, spoke in the Odyssey of the Atlantes and of their island. The tradition is therefore older than the song of Ulysses. Homer founded some fictions of his poem on it, because it is easy to embellish known facts, and because that tradition was distant. The footnote cites the Odyssey in Madame Dacier’s translation, tome I, pages 5 and 7, and the remarks, tome I, page 65, and tome II, pages 45 and 47.

The name of Atlas, or of the Atlantic people, resounds among all the writers of antiquity. The poet and the philosopher did not invent these names, and since names suppose the things, the ancient existence of the people is demonstrated. Those writers are not copyists of the philosopher, because they give details which are not in his dialogues. There was a fund of history or of tradition, and original sources from which they drew as Plato did. A footnote names Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo, Pliny, Solon, Euripides, and others. Diodorus of Sicily and the ancient Sanchoniathon preserved the genealogies and the deeds of the Atlantic heroes. The letter closes, on the page headed 45, by saying that Plato has described the Atlantic island, and that Diodorus is about to speak of the men who inhabited it and of the men who came out of it. The history of the most distant times is not entirely lost. It exists, but rumpled, and divided among different authors.

Treizième lettre

The table titles the thirteenth letter a confirmation of the existence of the Atlantic people, and of the antiquity and power of that people, and it gives page 46. The leaf I have next, after the close of the twelfth letter on the page headed 45, is already headed 48, and the sentence is already under way. I did not find the opening leaf, or a dateline, between those two heads. What follows is the genealogy, drawn after the authors the twelfth letter has just named.

A man read in the stars. His name was given to the high part of the universe where the hand of God sowed them, and he himself was called the eternal king of all things. That is the first deified man, and the source of idolatry. The pure sentiment of benefits, and gratitude, this time engendered an abuse of piety. The Chinese who revere Tien, or Heaven, and the Siamese who adore the eternal Heaven under the name Sommona-Kodom, seem to him to have been instructed by the Atlantes and to be only the worshippers of Uranus, placed in the heaven with his name.

Il fut très fécond; il eut quarante-cinq enfans de plusieurs femmes; Titéa seule lui en donna dix-huit, nommés de son nom Titans.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 48

He was very fruitful. He had forty-five children by several wives. Titea alone gave him eighteen, named Titans from her own name.

The next leaf names, among the children of Uranus, Hyperion, Atlas, and Saturn. The elder daughters were Basilee and Rhea, also called Pandore. Hyperion, succeeding his father, married his sister. The letter is the genealogy and the power of the people whose existence the twelfth letter defended. On the leaves I read it does not yet name a homeland, and it does not describe a flood of waters. The idolatry, the Titans, and the worship of Heaven are the customs he is setting beside the Atlantes.

Quatorzième lettre

The fourteenth letter is the first search for the lost people. It opens on the page headed 76, not on the 87 the table prints. The title is Premiere recherche du peuple perdu. The dateline is Paris, 18 March 1778.

A Paris, ce 18 Mars 1778.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 76

At Paris, 18 March 1778.

It was natural to follow Plato, and those who followed him were not all philosophers. Plato said this people lived on an island near a continent, opposite the mouth where the columns of Hercules are. He could not have expressed himself better if he had meant to deceive posterity, or rather the circumstances of the new institutions made his description equivocal and deceitful. Men asked where on earth the columns of Hercules were, and they looked. On the next page, headed 77, the terms of Hercules’ useful and glorious course were found near Cadiz, at the strait of Gibraltar.

Là sont deux montagnes célèbres dans l'antiquité, Calpé & Abila; elles n'en faisaient qu'une jadis, Hercule les sépara de ses mains pour ouvrir aux eaux de la Méditerranée un passage dans l'Océan.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 77

There stand two mountains famous in antiquity, Calpé and Abila. They once made only one. Hercules separated them with his hands to open a passage for the waters of the Mediterranean into the Ocean.

Besides these columns of nature, two columns consecrated to Hercules stood in his temple at Cadiz. The strait of Gibraltar represented the mouth of which Plato speaks. These monuments guided the moderns. They looked for the Atlantic island beyond the strait and in the Ocean. They imposed the name Atlantic on that immense sea which hid, or which had once bathed, the island Atlantis. The island was not so small that it could not be found easily if it still existed. Plato teaches that it had 3000 stades in length and 2000 in breadth, that is an extent of about 150 leagues by 100, and almost equal to that of France. At the same time he says that this island had been something further, and the sentence continues off the page. The letter’s point, already in the sentences above, is that the Gibraltar reading misled the search.

Quinzième lettre

The fifteenth letter continues the search for the Atlantes. It opens on the page headed 98, which is the page the table gives. The title is Suite de la recherche des Atlantes. The dateline is Paris, 21 March 1778. They return to Asia. It is the cradle of the world, the center of antiquity, and it is there that they will find the Atlantes. It would not have been necessary to recall some moderns who went astray toward the western extremity of Africa, and who even crossed the sea with Columbus in order to push their researches as far as America. Ancient ideas have to be erased before new ones are proposed. If the sea where the Canaries are has been named Atlantic, from a wish to bring the Atlantes out of it, that denomination is modern. Asia also offers a sea called Atlantic since a time that goes back to Herodotus. The page ends on “il y a près,” and I do not finish the figure from the next leaf.

By the page headed 102 the navigation he has been discussing came out of an island, as he had announced. Along the sea where one finds the trading towns of Tyre and Sidon are Phoenicia and Judea. M. Baer thinks that this last province is the Atlantis of Plato. He finds relations between the names of the twelve sons of Jacob and the brothers of Atlas. Those resemblances, supposed true, would not be extraordinary. The Bible contains the tradition most closely followed and best preserved. It is the purest source of history. Despite these relations, ingeniously set out by M. Baer, they cannot stop in Palestine. That is not the term of the researches. They ask for the Atlantic island. This country between the Euphrates and the sea is not an island, and Plato’s tale seems to leave no equivocation on that point. That the Atlantes passed through this country, and left institutions there, is what it is not possible to revoke. The sentence continues off the page. The letter then moves the search on from Palestine. I am not giving it a year for Herodotus, because the opening leaf does not finish that clause.

Seizième lettre

The sixteenth letter is on the ancient Persians and their oldest history. It opens on the page headed 128. The table’s continuation gives the same number. The dateline is Paris, 26 March 1778.

A Paris, ce 26 Mars 1778.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 128

At Paris, 26 March 1778.

Entering Persia, one enters another world, but an ancient world. One sees everywhere the traces of an ancient culture, and those great monuments which are the works of time and of power. M. Danville described singular sculptures, giant figures cut in the rock, forming vast low reliefs. It is said that this is a monument of the glory of Semiramis. It is certain that the tradition is lost. If it belongs to the reign of that queen, the sentence breaks at the foot of the page. The footnote names the memoirs of the Academy of Belles-Lettres. I do not print a number of centuries for Semiramis, because this leaf does not give one.

On the page headed 132 he reports the Oriental saying about the time before Adam.

On dit que Dieu avant la formation d'Adam créa les Dives, & leur donna le monde à gouverner pendant l'espace de sept mille ans.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 132

It is said that God, before the formation of Adam, created the Dives, and gave them the world to govern for the space of seven thousand years.

The Peris succeeded them and occupied the earth for two thousand years more. A footnote names Herbelot, bibliothèque orientale, p. 298, and a second note, ibid., p. 387, for the statement that the Dives were giants. The Dives were powerful and strong. The Peris were better and wiser. The fable, which mixes itself with everything in order to disfigure everything, says the Dives were male and the Peris female. The two kinds were distinct. They did not unite by the attraction of the sexes. They were rather enemies. He is astonished that the Dives were made so wicked. He has enough confidence in the signification of words, and he thinks this is the tradition best preserved. The sentence breaks at the page edge. The letter is still the search for the people who taught Asia. The Dives and the Peris are the ancient race he is willing to put before Adam.

Dix-septième lettre

The table titles the seventeenth letter Des Fées & des Péris, and gives page 154. The page I read, headed 156, is already inside the argument. It has no dateline on that leaf. The idea is of spirits who surround us, who live invisibly in the elements, or who reside in all the parts of nature in order to animate its productions. As in this life we feel the need of a better life, and we feel our weakness, imagination has given birth to different beings and different species of spirits. When man discovered the immortal substance which ennobles his existence, he stole it from destruction and gave it immortality. Matter can circulate without ceasing. It envelops souls, but it alone is destructible.

Later in the same letter the Dives, the Peris, and the fairies, who were none of the secondary gods, were a race of men, a race separated by a long interval of time, a race seen through a veil, whose idea, long alive in memory, was exaggerated by fear or by love. He counts four lost peoples he can show: the Atlantes, a neighboring people indicated by Plato, the Dives, and the Peris, whose memory is faithfully kept among the Persians. Up to this point the efforts have been useless for finding the country of the Atlantes. He asks Voltaire not to lose courage. They may yet meet the country of the fairies. That country pleased him infinitely in his childhood. On the next leaf the fairies and the genii have re-entered the order of natural things. They are no longer anything but men. This letter names the Atlantes and says their country has not yet been found. It does not describe a flood, and it does not fix a latitude.

Dix-huitième lettre

The eighteenth letter is the origin of the Persians beyond the ramparts of Asia. The running head is printed 179, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 2 April 1778.

A Paris, ce 2 Avril 1778.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 179

At Paris, 2 April 1778.

Monsieur, les montagnes où ont habité les Péris, au-delà desquelles les Dives ont été relégués, sont les montagnes de Caf & de Damavend.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 179

Sir, the mountains where the Peris lived, and beyond which the Dives were set apart, are the mountains of Caf and of Damavend.

Damavend was once a town of the province of Adherbigian, or of ancient Media. It lies at 37 degrees of latitude, placed at the foot of a chain of mountains which goes to join the Caucasus. The mountains of Caf are only the Caucasus itself. Footnotes name Herbelot, p. 283 and p. 231. This famous mountain of antiquity extends from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, then descends toward the south, and the sentence continues off the page. The place he has fixed on the page I read is Damavend at 37 degrees, and Caf as the Caucasus. He does not on this leaf call that range the island Atlantis.

Dix-neuvième lettre

The nineteenth letter is considerations on the ground of Tartary and on its population. It opens on the page headed 218, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 9 April 1778. He has brought Voltaire onto these mountains, to the highest place of the globe, or at least of Asia. The elevation where they are does not consist in the heights alone. The plains at their feet are the broad summits of other mountains. Those summits once carried empires. He has no received word for lands raised upon other lands, as our hills are raised upon our little plains, and he asks leave to call them plateaux.

Permettez-moi de désigner ces terres sous le nom de plateaux.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 218

Allow me to designate these lands under the name of plateaux.

The letter argues the ground: high Asia, plateaux, and a Tartary that could have been populous. On the opening page it does not name the island Atlantis, and it does not describe a flood. It is the seat on which the peoples of the letters before it could have stood.

Vingtième lettre

The twentieth letter is the discovery of a lost people. It opens on the page headed 240, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 12 April 1778. The first Tartar they must consult is a khan of the Usbecks, Abolghazi, reigning in the last century at Karasm, on the shores of the Caspian. He wrote a history of his nation, composed from tradition and from original memoirs. Asia is the country of the nobility of men. It is not, as among us, a matter of young peoples, newly arrived, whose titles scarcely go back twelve or fourteen centuries and arrive at the rupture of a barbarous and almost savage horde. There everything is ancient. Everything is born with the earth, or with the deluge which made a new world.

Là tout est antique, tout naît avec la terre, ou avec le déluge qui a fait un nouveau monde.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 240

There everything is ancient. Everything is born with the earth, or with the deluge which made a new world.

The Tartars whom we despise have their genealogy, and the sentence continues onto the next leaf. By the page headed 244 the letter is inside the story of Oguz. A continuous chronology begins with his reign. Four thousand years passed between Oguz and Gingiskan. Oguz is placed 2824 years before our era.

Oguz se trouve placé 2824 ans avant notre ère.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 244

Oguz is placed 2824 years before our era.

In the history of ancient astronomy Bailly tried, by conjectures, to reduce the enormous number of the Tartar cycles, and he estimated that these cycles must have begun 2924 years before Christ. The footnote points to that history, p. 342. The chronology he estimated therefore agrees very well with the chronology of this history. Oguz was a conqueror. He is said to have subdued Tartary, China, and Persia. Bailly says it was only a war of raids and of plunder. The sentence breaks on that page at the syllable for plunder. Another footnote points to the Histoire générale des voyages, volume XXV, pp. 108 and 110. The same inquiry brings in the people of the Tschoudes. The map note, which I read, marks their country from the voyage of M. Pallas. I am not copying a degree of latitude for them from this letter, because I did not read that figure on a page I set beside the image.

Vingt-unième lettre

The twenty-first letter is on the languages of the North and the garden of the Hesperides. It opens on the page headed 271, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 20 April 1778. Speech is the distinctive character of man. As the expression of thought, it separates him from all living beings. As the expression of genius, it marks his rank and distinguishes one individual from another. All men resemble one another in silence. Peoples are distinguished and judged by languages, as men are by speech. The physical part of a language wears the accent of the climate. The intellectual part shows the genius of the people. Language is the result of ideas. The mind paints itself in its work. Languages well known and well studied can therefore reveal the origin of peoples, the countries they have lived in, and the point their knowledge reached. The sentence continues off the page.

On the page headed 308 he states the place of the garden.

Le jardin des Hespérides est près du pôle.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 308

The garden of the Hesperides is near the pole.

He admits that this conclusion is surprising. A soil which produces golden apples can only be a fertile soil. Gold is the sign of wealth. Even if those apples, according to some interpreters, were only sheep covered with an abundant and gilded fleece, fine sheep are born only in fine countries. It is the sky which makes the plants and the fruits. It is the plants which make the animals. That fertility disturbs the idea one forms of a country where one no longer sees anything but ice. He could draw a fine argument in favor of the cooling of the earth, but he does not need to say everything. If the conclusion is as just as he thinks, it will have only more force when Voltaire draws it himself. Perhaps Voltaire will reconcile himself with the climates of the Oural. Bailly wants to rehabilitate them entirely in Voltaire’s mind. The letter’s finding, on the page I read, is that northern place for the Hesperides, inside the same inquiry that has already moved the Atlantes away from Gibraltar.

Vingt-deuxième lettre

The twenty-second letter is the voyage to the underworld. It opens on the page headed 310, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 28 April 1778. Of all fables, the fable of the underworld may be the most apt to clear the question that divides him and Voltaire. Men who have so embellished the past have not forgotten the future. They furnished the Elysian fields, which they were to inhabit, with gentle and flattering chimeras. They placed the repose of the other life far away, but above all the knowledge of the truth and of nature. It is there that one would have to go to seek the truth. But one would not want to abandon life, always dear, although always heavy. In antiquity the poets and the heroes went down quite alive. The page ends on that clause. On this opening leaf the letter names no Atlantic island and describes no flood. It uses the descent as a way into the question of origins. Later leaves of the same letter, which I followed in the text and did not quote, bring bronze tables seen at Delos and said to have been brought from the countries of the North. I am not printing a page for that clause, because I did not set that leaf beside the image.

Vingt-troisième lettre

The twenty-third letter is the discovery of the homeland of the Atlantes. It opens on the page headed 356, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 5 May 1778.

A Paris, ce 5 Mai 1778.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 356

At Paris, 5 May 1778.

Plato spoke to the Athenians of the finest and best generation of men that ever existed. Only a weak seed of it had escaped, and the Athenians were the descendants. He adds that Athens alone resisted the efforts of a great power come out of the Atlantic sea. A footnote points back to p. 21. There was as much politeness as truth in the compliment. A philosopher’s flattery must keep some truth, so a vague and confused tradition of some descent existed in Greece. The Greeks boasted of commerce with the Hyperboreans. On the page headed 358 he gives the route and the place.

Pausanias nous apprend que les Hyperboréens les remettaient aux Arimaspes, ceux-ci aux Issédons, les Issédons aux Scythes, qui les faisaient passer en Europe: ces trois peuples sont évidemment des peuples qui habitaient la Tartarie, entre le Caucase & la mer glaciale.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 358

Pausanias tells us that the Hyperboreans handed them to the Arimaspes, these to the Issedons, the Issedons to the Scythians, who passed them into Europe. These three peoples are evidently peoples who lived in Tartary, between the Caucasus and the frozen sea.

Diodorus of Sicily was therefore right to place the Hyperboreans toward the north and on an island of that sea. A footnote sends the reader to the position of these peoples of Tartary in the ancient geography of M. Danville, tome II, pp. 321, 323, and 324. Another note names Bannier. The same page asks whether one can put much faith in the virgins and the offerings, on so long a voyage, repeated every year, in a time when communication was difficult. The sentence continues onto the next page.

On the page headed 365 the word which in Greece and in Italy meant a ship has the same signification in the languages of the North. In those same languages ship is still a ship. The word is kept in English, and it is found at the other end of the world among the Kouriles as the name of a small canoe. Those peoples can have had a common source only in the North. There, where they took the name of ships and of canoes, they also took the idea of navigation. Those who taught it, the Phoenicians, bold navigators, keeping the cult of the Sun and the memory of all the chiefs of the Atlantes, had surely come down with them from the Caucasus, were perhaps the Atlantes themselves under a changed name, and had like them their homeland in the North. The sentence ends on the next leaf, headed 366, where the languages show the origin of navigation. In their temple of Hercules there were always two columns, one dedicated to fire, to the Sun which was lacking in cold countries, and the other to the wind which led them into the continent and into a new and more habitable homeland.

On that same page he sets two flood memories, and he does not call them the universal deluge in the sentence I quote.

Cependant les Orientaux semblent en avoir conservé quelques traditions: les Chinois ont leur Peirun, aimé des Dieux, qui se sauva d'une inondation dans une barque; les anciens peuples de la Suede ont leur Belgemer, également sauvé dans une barque avec sa femme.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 366

Yet the Orientals seem to have kept some traditions of it. The Chinese have their Peirun, loved of the gods, who saved himself from an inundation in a boat. The ancient peoples of Sweden have their Belgemer, likewise saved in a boat with his wife.

The place they escaped from seems to lie between the northern parts, and the line breaks at the page edge. A footnote names Kempfer’s history of Japan, book III, chapter 5. The next leaf says they are not obliged to carry these traditions back to the universal deluge. They can belong to particular deluges. The Tartars say that formerly their fathers, sailing on the lake Kitai, where the river Oby takes its source, had seen from afar in that lake great buildings, partly submerged. That is an indication that this part of the world may indeed have suffered some particular inundation. The Greeks, the greatest thieves of antiquity, who appropriated the fables, the histories, the heroes, and the inventors of the sciences, may also have appropriated the great catastrophes of nature. He quotes the Abbé Bannier: there is nothing so obscure as the history of Ogyges and of the deluge which happened under his reign. Was this prince a native of Greece, or a foreigner? In what time did he live? What is the deluge of Ogyges? Bannier abandons the three questions, and Bailly takes the liberty of proposing his own conjectures.

Diodorus of Sicily has taught that the Titans, or the giants, were born of Uranus and of the earth in the country of the Atlantes. Pherecydes, a Greek historian, says the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans. Hyperborea was therefore the country of the giants. Three of them were named Cottus, Briareus, and Gygès. They had a hundred hands and fifty heads. They inhabited a dark land, and the Tartarus where Jupiter cast them. They aided Saturn.

On the page headed 384 he is still inside Plutarch’s geography, which he has been quoting. Rivers descend from the mainland and pour out their waters. The shores of the continent along the sea are inhabited near a great bay, not smaller than the Palus Maeotis, whose mouth is precisely opposite the Caspian Sea. All that is perfectly described. The Greeks could not have guessed this geography. They learned it by the tradition of the peoples descended from the North. The frozen sea which neighbors the pole can indeed be enclosed almost circularly by the continents of Asia, of Europe, and of America.

Ces quatre îles peuvent être l'Islande, le Groenland, le Spitzberg & la nouvelle Zemble, ou quelques îles inconnues, plus avancées, & aujourd'hui inaccessibles.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 384

These four islands may be Iceland, Greenland, Spitzberg, and Nova Zembla, or some unknown islands, further on, and inaccessible today.

The footnote says Greenland and Spitzberg perhaps hold to the continent, but Plutarch, vaguely instructed by a truncated tradition, may have believed that these countries were islands. He will take care not to choose among the islands which still subsist and which are accessible. One may have believed that the island Atlantis was swallowed, or lost in the sea, only because one ceased to go there, because the accumulated ice frightened navigators who were not very bold at the beginning. Atlantis is perhaps only closed by the ice, and defended by it. He limits himself to following Plutarch. He shows, as Plutarch does, the islands of the northern sea. The islands of which Plutarch speaks are distant by five thousand stades, which are worth 10 degrees. This is the place claim of the twenty-third letter. The island of the story remains the island Plato transmitted. The homeland he is now willing to discuss is the North: the Hyperboreans on an island of the frozen sea, the offering-route through Tartary between the Caucasus and that sea, the Phoenicians as Atlantes under another name, and Plutarch’s four islands read as Iceland, Greenland, Spitzberg, and Nova Zembla.

Vingt-quatrième lettre

The twenty-fourth letter is on the earlier people, and a recapitulation of these letters. It opens on the page headed 403, the page the table gives. The dateline is Paris, 12 May 1778. It is a fine thing, voyages. In running through interesting countries one acquires new ideas, even unexpected ones. Everything is paradox or romance for a sedentary man. Truth is only for those who seek it. One must see nature, which one cannot guess, and which one has scarcely yet begun to understand when it manifests itself. It is not in vain that men have advanced toward the north. With all their prejudices against those frozen regions, they would not have imagined placing there the habitation of a great part of mankind, of that warlike and conquering part. The page ends on that clause. The next page, headed 404, states the conclusion and the limit he had used before.

C'est sans doute une étrange conclusion que cette ancienne habitation des hommes dans le Spitzberg, dans le Groenland, & dans la nouvelle Zemble.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 404

It is without doubt a strange conclusion, this ancient habitation of men in Spitzberg, in Greenland, and in Nova Zembla.

He has been struck, as Voltaire can be, by this singularity. He had trouble conceiving it. He proposed this origin in his first letters only as a conjecture. At that time he did not go higher than the 49th degree of latitude. If he goes further, the facts lead him. If he is less timid, it is the truth which emboldens him. Voltaire may say that he is making a system, and Voltaire’s indulgence will add that it is ingenious. That play of the mind is not in his character. Felt truth has too much empire over him. He does not feel the courage to fight it face to face. His pen would find no excuse. The sentence continues off the page. He distinguishes a system that is only the joining of facts from a romance. I am not quoting that next discussion of the interior heat of the earth.

On the page headed 427 he names the earlier people. The Persians, the Indians, the Siamese, or even the Chinese, had astronomical tables precise enough for a certain exactness, founded on different elements, the sign of separate researches. The authors of these languages and of these tables seem to him the true earlier people he has indicated.

J'incline à penser que ce peuple est celui dont le nom Magog a fourni à nos langues modernes les mots mage, magie, magister, magistrat, magnificence, magnanimité.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 427

I incline to think that this people is the one whose name Magog has supplied to our modern languages the words mage, magie, magister, magistrat, magnificence, and magnanimité.

He has great confidence in this memory of things which is kept in words. Science, wisdom, power, and greatness of soul came out of the root Mag, or out of the people whose name recalled these ideas. Everything that is great was named from his name. The name remains in denominations which belong to agriculture, the most ancient of all institutions. A footnote gives the Latin Magalia, huts or cabins, Magigofforus, a thresher, Maginium, a disease of oxen, Magnalia, high deeds, Magnates, the great ones, and Magnitudo, grandeur or extent. This name leads to all the origins, to the foot of the rampart of Magog, at the latitude of 49, and the line breaks at “49 de”. The next leaf completes the word as degrees, at the place where the Peris fought, or where the Tschoudes lived. Those three peoples have much analogy. He asks whether they formed a system of nations like the European people, or whether one should count several peoples.

On the page headed 434 the peoples of the North, held in by the barriers of the Caucasus, increased in time their number and their forces. They besieged the mountains. They delivered assaults. That is the war of the Dives and the Peris. He sees himself reduced to the embarrassment of the authors of romances, who, after leading their prince or their hero to the last volume, no longer know how to get rid of him, and finish by having him assassinated. After placing his earlier people on the second plateau, and under the ramparts of Gog and of Magog, he has to get rid of that people, since it has ceased to exist. It is for that reason that he brings in the Atlantes.

C'est pour cela que j'amène les Atlantes, qui, sous la conduite de Bacchus ou d'Osiris, forcent le passage par leur multitude, détruisent en un moment un grand empire & l'ouvrage des sciences.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 434

It is for that reason that I bring in the Atlantes, who, under the lead of Bacchus or of Osiris, force the passage by their multitude and destroy in a moment a great empire and the work of the sciences.

That is why Plato, who wanted to flatter the Athenians by making them descend from this people, says that their ancestors resisted for a long time a great power come out of the Atlantic sea, but that afterwards all their warriors perished in the space of a day and a night. The conquest of an empire in a day of 14 hours is a little prompt. Plato was a poet. He wanted to enlarge the event still further by the speed. The Orientals have the memory of this revolution. Eblis was sent by God to destroy and disperse the Dives and the Peris. Eblis defeated their monarch Gian-ben-Gian in a general combat. Among the peoples of Asia who recognized two causes in nature, Eblis was the devil, the principle of evil. A conqueror who troubles the repose of peoples, and who destroys a great nation, is that not the principle of evil? The footnote on this page, still in the priest’s voice to Solon, says the barbarians did arrive by a mouth like the one Plato speaks of, situated opposite an island.

Ces barbares sont arrivés en effet par une embouchure semblable à celle dont parle Platon, & située vis-à-vis d'une île qui doit être la nouvelle Zemble.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), p. 435

These barbarians did indeed arrive by a mouth like the one of which Plato speaks, and situated opposite an island which must be Nova Zembla.

I do not collapse the twenty-fourth letter into a claim that Plato’s island was Spitzberg. He calls the northern habitation a strange conclusion. He distinguishes it from the conjecture of the first letters, which stopped at the 49th degree. The Atlantic island remains the tradition of the twelfth letter. The people anterior to the known nations of Asia is what this last letter is trying to name, and the footnote on p. 435 is the place where he says the island opposite the mouth must be Nova Zembla. Near the close he also sets elephants which left their carcasses in Siberia and have their young in the South, as a sign that man could have followed the same route, and the wheat which feeds us, born in those climates, as something man must have brought. I am not quoting that last leaf. The sentence I have quoted is the one that names the island.

Table

The table occupies file pages 432 and 433. File page 432 has no printed numeral. The head of file page 433 is printed 443. The title is the table of the letters on Atlantis and on the ancient history of Asia. I copy the order, and I give the numeral the table prints. Where I have also read the letter’s own running head, I say so.

• Avertissement. No page in the table. File page 11.
• Fourth letter of M. de Voltaire to M. Bailly. Table page 1. The leaf has no numeral. File page 13.
• Eleventh letter of M. Bailly to M. de Voltaire. Exposition of the subject of these new letters, and first example of a lost people. Table page 9, and the letter is headed 9.
• Twelfth letter. Tale of Atlantis; it is not a fiction. Table page 25, and the letter is headed 25.
• Thirteenth letter. Confirmation of the existence of the Atlantic people; antiquity and power of that people. Table page 46. The next leaf I could read is headed 48.
• Fourteenth letter. First search for a lost people. The table prints 87. The letter itself is headed 76.
• Fifteenth letter. Continuation of the search for the Atlantes. Table page 98, and the letter is headed 98.
• Sixteenth letter. On the ancient Persians and their oldest history. The table’s second leaf gives 128, and the letter is headed 128.
• Seventeenth letter. On the fairies and the Peris. Table page 154. The page I read is headed 156.
• Eighteenth letter. Origin of the Persians beyond the ramparts of Asia. Table page 179, and the letter is headed 179.
• Nineteenth letter. Considerations on the ground of Tartary and on its population. Table page 218, and the letter is headed 218.
• Twentieth letter. Discovery of a lost people. Table page 240, and the letter is headed 240.
• Twenty-first letter. On the languages of the North and the garden of the Hesperides. Table page 271, and the letter is headed 271.
• Twenty-second letter. Voyage to the underworld. Table page 310, and the letter is headed 310.
• Twenty-third letter. Discovery of the homeland of the Atlantes. Table page 356, and the letter is headed 356.
• Twenty-fourth letter. On the earlier people, and recapitulation of these letters. Table page 403, and the letter is headed 403.
• End of the table.

Where the table’s numeral and the running head disagree, I keep the head I read on the letter. The fourteenth letter is the clear case. The thirteenth is the case where the table’s page is a leaf this scan does not show me between pages 45 and 48.

Avis pour la carte

The note for the map is file page 434. It has no printed number. It follows the table headed 443. I did not read a map image. I read this note.

Cette carte, quant aux contours des côtes, aux rivières, aux montagnes, a été copiée sur la carte d'Asie de M. Danville.

M. Bailly. Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon et sur l'ancienne histoire de l'Asie (1779), file p. 434

This map, as to the outlines of the coasts, the rivers, and the mountains, was copied from M. Danville’s map of Asia.

The position of some ancient peoples, such as the Issedones, the Arimaspes, the Hyperboreans, the Massagetae, and the Amazons, was taken from a map drawn after the descriptions of Herodotus and inserted in the first volume of the old memoirs of the Academy of Petersburg. The country of the Tschoudes was indicated by the voyage of M. Pallas. For the rest, he wanted only to give a picture of the places relative to the historical points treated in this work. He did not intend to draw a map on which the positions and the limits of peoples would be marked with great exactness. That exactness, useless for the object in question, would have required much time and abler hands. The page prints Danville. The peoples on this note are the ones the twenty-third letter has already set between the Caucasus and the frozen sea, with the Tschoudes added from Pallas.