IN NORTH AMEEICA. 33 



of Quebec, of which he was editor, traced, iu a learned and readable paper, the origin, 

 development and decline of the story from the days of Plato to the present. He aptly 

 concludes with a quotation from the great Platonist, Dr. Jowett, who regards it as a pure 

 fabrication. Between this view, however, and its acceptance as a narrative of events, 

 which actually took place in a region that once had real existence, there may be several 

 degrees of assent or rejection. Along with " fanciful amplifications " of his own invention, 

 Plato may, iu the " Timaîus " and " Critias," have given expression to a vague tradition 

 of knowledge, once current iu ancient Europe, of a trans-Atlantic country and people. 

 This is the reasonable view adopted by Dr. Wilson in his paper on " The Lost Atlantis," 

 presented two years ago to this Section of the Royal Society. " It forms ", writes our 

 distinguished colleague, " one of the indisputable facts of ancient history that, long before 

 Greece became the world's intellectual leader, the eastern Mediterranean was settled by 

 maritime races, whose adventurous enterprise led them to navigate the Atlantic. There 

 was no greater impediment to such adventurous mariners crossing the Atlantic in earliest 

 centuries before Christ, than at any subsequent date prior to the revival of navigation in the 

 fifteenth century.'' If this view be admitted, there is no reason why some of the Iberians 

 may not have crossed to these shores ages before the Romans had anything to do with 

 Spain, and the resemblances in structure between the speech of the Basques and some of 

 the tongues spoken on this continent, may find their explanation in the fact that those 

 who use them are descendants of the same primitive stock. In that case the Basque 

 fishermen who made their way in the fifteenth, perhaps the fourteenth, century to these 

 shores were exemplifying the truth of the adage that blood is thicker than water. This is 

 the theory of Mr. Horatio Hale, who in his delightfully instructive treatise, "The Iroquois 

 Book of Rites," maintains that the early Europeans, of whom the Basques are the sole 

 survivors who have retained their original language, may have been of the same stock as 

 the Huron-Iroquois of the lower St. Lawrence. Mr. Hale has found confirmation for his 

 argument in Sir William Dawson's " Fossil Men ", where the relics of ancient human 

 habitation iu America are compared with similar finds in Europe. The preparation of the 

 work was prompted by the discovery, in 1861, of the remains of the ancient town of 

 Hochelaga, which had disappeared from sight for some three centuries and to the identi- 

 fication of which the record of Jacqu.es Cartier's visit was the only guide. On the basis 

 of that identification (but for which an endless controversy might have raged over the 

 fossils iu qiiestion), the author, " arguing from the known to the unknown, undertook to 

 illustrate the characters and condition of prehistoric men in Europe by those of the 

 American races." It so happens that among the prehistoric races of Europe with which, 

 in " Fossil Men ", some of our American tribes are brought into comparison, are those 

 which form the subject of the epoch-making "Reliquiae Aquitanicce." "What," asks Sir 

 William Dawson, " could the old man of Cro-Magnon have told us had we been able 

 to sit by his hearth and listen understandiugly to his speech, which, if we may judge 

 from the form of his palate bones, must have resembled more that of the Americans or 

 Mongolians than of any modern European people." But the old man of Cro-Magnon 

 lived in the very region in which the Iberian or Aquitanian ancestors of the Basques 

 (for whose language the very same claim is made to-day) dwelt in classical times. 

 Moreover M. Hamy met with the same Cro-Magnon type among the Basque skulls of 

 Zoraus. M. de Quatrefages also met with living specimens of it, and M. Louis Figuier, 



Sec. II, 1888. 5. 



