Atlantis — Birth and Death of Science : 97 



The Guanches are usually considered to have been a division 

 of the Berber people of North Africa. Henry Fairfield Osborne, 

 the paleontologist and anthropologist, quoted with apparent approval 

 a lengthy extract from a French authority who had spent some time 

 on the problem of the Guanches and suggested that they showed 

 strong affinity with the race of Cro-Magnon. Of course, this view 

 would imply that the Guanches had been on the Canary Islands for 

 a very long period of time. However this may be, it is clear that at 

 least two and possibly three expeditions had visited the Canary Islands 

 before the Portuguese rediscovered them. Plato's myth of the lost 

 island or continent of Atlantis is firmly associated with the name of 

 our ocean, but he was not the first of the Greek scholars to write of 

 the ocean. 



Hesiod in 750 b.c. had talked of the "Isles of the Blessed" and of the 

 "Hesperides" and of "Erythia"; all islands that were supposed to exist 

 in the outer ocean. This was the first appearance of the idea of islands 

 which persisted for so long, and reappeared so frequently in the his- 

 tory of the Atlantic Ocean. Following Hesiod there grew up in Greek 

 geography the idea that the surface of the earth could be divided into 

 zones — the zones representing, in a general way, the crude division 

 of the earth into belts of latitude. The belt at the extreme north was 

 so cold that life there was impossible; and the belt directly under the 

 sun, that is corresponding with our idea of the equator, so hot that 

 that also would not support life. Teachings like this, which had little 

 relationship to the real world, were accepted in Classic times even 

 by persons who were otherwise knowledgeable and scholarly. The love 

 which the Greeks had for a logical order and system produced splen- 

 did results in mathematics, such as the geometry of Euclid, and in 

 their architecture and in some of their decorative arts, but when they 

 came to geography it misled them, for they often preferred their rigid 

 theories to the reports of travelers who had made themselves ac- 

 quainted v\dth the real world. The idea of the uninhabited polar re- 

 gion and the uninhabited tropics survived the Classical period and 

 was revived with the Revival of Learning. Stefansson believes that in 

 one modification after another this idea has persisted right down to 

 our own day because of the veneration that European scholarship has 

 usually given to Greek learning. 



Herodotus, around 450 b.c, supplied us with the account of the 

 Phoenicians who went around Africa in the time of the Egyptian 

 King Necho. We are grateful to him for this service, but it is inter- 

 esting to observe that the reason he was skeptical about this passage 



