8 DR. DANIEL WILSON. 
“Of moving accidents by flood and field, 
And of the Cannibals that each other eat, 
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders.” 
The idea of an island-world lying in some unexplored ocean, apart from the influences 
which affect humanity at large, with beings, institutions, and a civilization of its own, had 
been the dream of very diverse minds. When indeed we recall what the rude Norse galley of 
Eric the Red must have been ; and what the little “ Pinta” and the “ Nina ” of Columbus— 
the latter with a crew of only 24 men,—actually were ; and remember, moreover, that the 
pole star was the sole compass of the earlier explorer: there seems nothing improbable in 
the assumption that the more ancient voyagers from the Mediterranean, who claimed to 
have circumnayigated Africa, and were familiar with the islands of the Atlantic, may have 
found their way to the great continent which lay beyond. Vague intimations, derived 
seemingly from Egypt, encouraged the belief in a submerged island or continent, once the 
seat of arts and learning, afar on the Atlantic main. The most definite narrative of this 
vanished continent is that recorded in the “ Timæus ” of Plato, on the authority of an account 
which Solon is affirmed to have received from an Egyptian priest. According to the latter 
the temple-records of the Nile preseryed the traditions of times reaching back far beyond 
the infantile fables of the Greeks. Yet, even these preserved some memory of deluges and 
convulsions by which the earth had been revolutionized. In one of them the vast Island 
of Atlantis—a continent larger than Libya and Asia conjoined,—had been engulfed in the 
ocean which bears its name. This ocean-world of fancy or tradition, Plato revived as the 
seat of his imaginary commonwealth; and it had not long become a world of fact when 
Sir Thomas More made it anew the seat of his famous Utopia, the exemplar of “the best 
state and form of a public weale.” “ Unfortunately,” as the author quaïntly puts it : “ neither 
we remembered to enquire of Raphael, the companion of Amerike Vespuce on his third 

voyage, nor he to tell us in what part of the new world Utopia is situate”: and so there 
is no reason why we should not locate the seat of this perfect commonwealth within our 
own young Dominion, so soon as we shall have merited it by the attainment of such 
Utopian perfectibility in our polity. 
But it is not less curious to note the tardiness with which, after the discovery of the 
new world had been placed beyond question, its true significance was comprehended even 
by men of culture, and abreast of the general knowledge of their time. Peter Giles, indeed, 
citizen of Antwerp, and assumed confidant of “ Master More,” writes with well simulated 
grief to the Right Hon. Counsellor Hierome Buslyde: “as touching the situation of the 
island, that is to say, in what part of the world Utopia standeth, the ignorance and lack 
whereof not a little troubleth and grieveth Master More :” but as he had allowed the 
opportunity of ascertaining this important fact to slip by ; so the like uncertainty long after 
mystified current ideas regarding new-found world. Ere the “ Flowers of the Forest ” had 
been weeded away on Flodden Hill, the philosophers and poets of the liberal court of 
James IV. of Scotland, had learned in some vague way of the recent discovery ; and so the 
Scottish poet, Dunbar, reflecting on the king’s promise of a benefice still unfulfilled, hints 
in his poem “ Of the world’s instabilitie,” that even had it come “ fra Calicut and the new 
found Isle” that lies beyond “the great sea-ocean, it might have comen in shorter while.” 
Upwards of twenty years had passed since the return of the great discoverer from his 
