His unpoetical disciple, Aristotle, has none of those quasi-revealings; none of the bold soarings towards worlds unknown. With the cautiousness of the logician, who admits nothing but facts, he merely states, in reference to this question, in his treatise of Heaven, "they who maintain that there is but one sea between the Columns of Her cules and India, are probably not far removed from the truth." Thanks to the authority of him whom Dante has called il maestro di color che sanno-the master of the human mind-that false idol before whom the world has so long bowed itself down in servile submission; this equivocal expression, India, runs throughout all ancient geography to designate these western lands. Yet why should we complain while present, and certainly better nurtured, generations still persist in the favorite nomenclature of "West Indies?"

The Alexandrian school-the trustee of some of the ideas and traditions which mystic Egypt occasionally sent forth from its hoary sanctuaries-treasured the confused reminiscence of a great land in that part of the ocean, and would not allow the legend to pass away unrecorded. Eratosthenes, three centuries before our era, held, on the sanction of Strabo, "that, were it not for the vast extent of the Atlantic ocean, it were an easy task to sail from the extremity of Iberia to India." Here, again, the name of India recurs! What could the appellation mean? We know how vague and undefined is the sense of that word among classical writers, even among the most approved geographers of antiquity. Southern Asia, Arabia, Ethiopia, and all the African provinces beyond Mount Atlas, are thus defined. It is not impossible that they may have intended to speak of India, properly so called; but the probability loses its force when it is borne in mind that Columbus himself, in directing his course to the west, believed that he was going to the East Indies, and that the nations, which he discovered, are to this day, however absurdly, known under the generic term of Indians:—these are indelible traces of error, which the systematized ignorance of the Stagyrite has substituted for the poetical dreams of Plato.

Had the books of Sanchoniatho outlived the great intellectual cataclysm of the past-were we more familiar with the antiquities of Tyre and Carthage-had posterity inherited their literary annals rudely violated and destroyed by the iron arm of conquest, we might be better qualified to account for the similarity of the Mexican and Phoenician monuments. The Greeks and Romans, whose career of discoveries was limited to the land, scarcely outsailed the basin of the Mediterranean sea. The exploring of the broad and many-waved acean was attempted by the Punic navies alone. Not that we should expect, however, any satisfactory accounts of their maritime expeditions; for Tyre and Carthage, acting in a spirit of selfishness-of which Strabo bitterly complains, and which characterises the commercial usages of some modern nations-involved the history of

their remote voyages, and the bearings of their ocean-tracks, in impervious secrecy. But we know, at least, that, as navigators, they far outstripped every nation of antiquity. The Carthaginians who had achieved the periplus of Africa, would never, like Virgil, or indeed like Alexander, have confounded the Indus with the Nile. These are errors which, though not sharing in them, they perchance contributed intentionally to spread; while the more correct data of their geographical science are entirely lost to posterity.

From their conquerors, a nation of mere brutal impulses and warLike orgasm, we need not expect any assistance or light. The subjection of the three quarters of the known globe was a task which required and engrossed all the energies of Rome; and it is not probable that, with her comparatively inefficient naval power, she should have turned her attention to the discovery of Atlantic worlds. The Greeks, humani ingenii custodes, as Macrobius calls them, the warders of the human intellect, carried their science into exile; and, as a reward for the humiliation of conquest, were satis fied with softening the rude legionary, and bending him to the sway of the sciences and the arts. Cicero, on the authority of Grecian sophists, casually alludes to the Antipodes. Under the reign of Augustus, in addition to several passages of Strabo, which it were neither entertaining nor instructive to analyse, Diodorus Siculus describes, in a turgid and highly rhetorical style, a vast and fertile island which he places in the west, opposite the African shore; the discovery of which he attributes to the Phoenicians, who expelled their sea rivals, the Etruscans, from its rich fields, and reserved it as a refuge-spot at some future day of calamity. (*) It is to be regretted that this description of Diodorus is, measurably, but a mere copy of Plato's Critias. But Perizonius, the scholar's oracle, in matters of archæological controvesy, in one of his notes on Elian-who quotes on the same subject a fantastic account given by Theopompus-does not hesitate to admit the identity of America with the Atlantic land. (†)

Under Claudius, Pomponius Mela, the geographer, was probably the mere echo and translator of the Greek authorities, when asserting that "all the habitable globe has the same seasons, though at different periods. The Antichthones inhabit one half of it; and we the other half. The former being unknown to us, on account of the torrid zone, which separates us; I shall be content to describe our

(*) Diod. Sic. Lib. v. Cap. 19 and 20.

(†) Nullus tamen dubito, quin veteres aliquid sciverint, sed quasi per nebulam et caliginem, de Americâ, partim ex antiquâ traditione, ab Ægyptiis vel Carthaginiensibus acceptâ, partim ex ratiocinatione de formâ et situ orbis terrarum, unde plane colligebant superesse in hoc orbe etiam alias terras præter Asiam, Africam, et Europæm. Perizonii in El. Var. His. An.

own hemisphere." In another place he speaks of Indians-Indidriven on the shores of Germany. Were they Indians from the other side of the ocean; or, as some have thought, Laplanders from the north? Pliny the elder, who also admits the existence of the Antipodes, does not stop to inquire into the position of the lands beyond the western waters. Thule is, to him, the last, farthest boundary of the earth. And yet this notion of another hemisphere must have long kept its hold on the convictions of antiquity; for St. Clemens, an immediate disciple of the Apostles, writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians: "The impervious ocean-xsavòs ȧnégavros and the lands beyond it obey the laws of the same God." () Seneca breathed a hope that this ocean might one day be crossed. The chorus of the second act of the Medea is as explicit as any of the passages to which we have alluded. And it is well known that its closing prophesy disdains the fatal bourne of Thule, and foretells the discovery of an unknown world. It were not irrelevant here to mention, that since the year 1492, the Spaniards have referred, with something like national pride, to the lyrics of their countryman, the poet of Corduba, which they look upon as a miraculous prediction of the new hemisphere, discovered by their ships, and conquered by their arms.

But there is another of Seneca's texts, less vulgarised and less frequently quoted; yet which does not the less deserve attention. It occurs in the first book of his Natural Questions. "The philosopher," says he, "despises the narrow bounds of his earthly home. And, indeed, how much time is required to go from the western extremity of Spain to India? A very few days, if the wind be but fair". (†) It is not improbable that he alludes to the Canaries-the Insula beata-the islands of the blest, as they were then called, where Sertorius had an intention of settling; and which the ignorance of the Romans, in every kind of maritime geography, might have designated by the words usque ad Indos. The hypothesis assumes a greater probability in view of the fact, that they designated as Indians almost all the unknown nations of the earth. Baron de Zach, in his astronomical correspondence, for the year 1826, construes the sentence of Seneca into a proof that America was frequently visited from Spain. (†) It were not altogether irrational to suppose that Spain, long subjected to Punic domination, had once possessed, and still retained, the secret of the Carthaginian mariners.

Some time after Seneca, who had an opportunity of seeing-and who has in fact described one of the earthquakes of Herculanēum

(*) Fabricius. Apocryph. Cod. Epist. Sti. Clementis.

(†) Natur. Quest. Lib. i Cap. iii.

(*) Bulletin des Sciences et des Arts. Sect. Astron. Paris, 1827.

and Pompeii-both those cities were, under the reign of Titus, destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius. The excavation of the ruins has been progressing since the middle of the last century. A beautiful painting, dug out of the remains of Pompeii, in 1833, may not be unconnected with this question, or foreign to the presentiment, if not the knowledge, of another hemisphere. The three quarters of the olden world are typified in the painting;-Europe under the form of a richly attired queen seated on a throne-Asia, by a woman clad in an elephant's hide, with its trunk and tusks-Africa, by an Ethiopian maiden, protected by a crocodile. The last two are standing on the right and left of Europe; and they seem to await the behest of a sovereign. Behind the three figures, a shadowy bark, under full sail, is stretching off in a western direction. What is the mission of this vessel, rashly detached from the group, and rushing excursive out of the circle inscribed by the geographers of the day? Had the adventurers, that mounted her, heard of some nameless shore-some unvisited land, the far off limit of the billows, which they dared; or of the western ocean, long known to antiquity as the Dark Sea? Was it, perchance, the intention of the artist to indicate, by this sailing wide of the old sea-tracks, that if this fourth and unknown region could not be pictured, it might, at least, be the object of research? These questions were vexed by the learned interpreters of the museum of Naples, who, on the redemption of the painting, unanimously proclaimed it to be an allegory. (*) Did they successfully unfold this apocalypse of the past? Is there any likelihood in their very ingenious speculations? As the ancient history of the new world is involved in doubt, we leave it to time, or to some further and unexpected discovery, to confute or substantiate the accuracy of the explanation.

But to return to our glimpses of authority. Apuleius, under the Antonines, translated into the Latin language a treatise on cosmogony, which was attributed to Aristotle; but which later criticism, assisted by a more enlightened philology, has assigned to a more recent period than the days of the Stagyrite. Be this as it may-from the fact, that the authorship of the work was questionable, under the Antonines, it is evident that the original existed long before that era. Now the Greek text, faithfully translated by Apuleius, affirms that there are other continents, like those formed by Europe, Asia, and Africa. "The most part," says the author, "view the terrestial globe as a continent, with its islands, not knowing, no doubt, that all the earth, surrounded by the Atlantic ocean, is but an island itself, with all its islands. And we think, that afar off-remotis regionibus-many other islands, some similar to our world, and others

(*) Saggio intorn allo discoprimento d'un quadro Pompejano. Naples, 1833; Biblioteca Italiana, and quoted by Raoul. Rochette-Comparative Archæology.

larger or smaller, might be found, the shores of which are antiporthmoi-opposite to our own "Is it astonishing," adds Apuleius, "that we should not know them, when we have not been able entirely to explore that portion of the globe on which we live?" The spherical form of the world was known, at least admitted; and the expression, arbis terrarum, the globe of the earth, was in daily use among the ancients. Can it be a matter of surprise or doubt, that they should have attempted to explore the other hemisphere? Could it be be lieved that it was concealed beneath the waves of the ocean-the recesses of the ἀρυγετοιο Θαλάσσης—the barren sea, as Homer calls the deep? Proclus-who, in common with the other neo-Platonists, allegorically explains the Atlantis-is compelled to acknowledge In his magnificent commentary on the Timæus, that if the earth be a spheroid, there must be a continent similar to that of Europe in the great ocean;-a strong and powerful sample of inductive reasoning, vainly controverted by St. Austin, Lactantius, and the Popes, with a view to guard the integrity of Holy Writ. It was an argument that had not escaped the eagle penetration of Aristotle; and which, repeated by Proclus, Macrobius, Marcianus Capella, in the fifth century, became, in the fifteenth, the war-cry of Columbus; and, in the hands of this "nudo nocchier, promettitor di regni,"—this ragged pilot, promiser of realms-assumed the form of an invincible enthymem, with which he battered the sophistry of monks, and secured the patronage of Isabella for his scheme.

As the scope of these pages is to collate, and that in a summary manner, whatever was known or fancied of our hemisphere by Grecian and Roman antiquity, it is not relevant to our purpose to inquire whether the Chinese visited America in the latter half of the fifth century of our era. Neither is it our province to ascertain who was the white and bearded man, dressed in the dark sacerdotal robe -Quetzalcoalt-whom the Mexicans traditionally revered; nor to follow the Northmen to the coast of Greenland, whence they penetrated through the interior to the southwest; (*) nor to trace the maritime expeditions of the Arabs to the west, during their domination in Spain. Still less profitable would it be to attempt building up the unwritten history of the colony supposed, in the twelfth century, to have been led in the same direction by Madoc of Wales: or to compare the Italian traditions of Andrea Bianco, of Venice, with the pretensions in favor of Marten Behain, of Nurembergh, and of his far-famed model of the globe, on which, before the close of the fifteenth century, he had traced out, not the route of Christoval

(*) Duchesne de Gestis Normannorum, Vol. ii. p. 435. Thomas Gale, Histor. Anglo-danica Scriptores. in fol. Oxford, 1683. Memoires de l'Acad. des Inscrips. et des Belles Letters. t. 12. partie Historique.