496 COSMOS. 



In accordance with the requirements for the generalisation 

 of ideas demanded by the present work, I have considered the 

 discovery of a group of islands, lying only 168 miles from the 

 African shore, as the first member of a long series of similarly 

 directed efforts, but I have made 110 allusion to the Elysium, 

 the Islands of the Blessed, fabled by the poetic visions of fancy, 

 as situated on the confines of the earth, in an ocean warmed 

 by the rays of the near setting sun. All the enjoyments of 

 life and the choicest products of nature were supposed to be 

 placed at the remotest distance of the terrestrial globe.* 

 The ideal land the geographical myth of the Elysion -was 

 removed further to the west, even beyond the Pillars of Her- 

 cules, as the knowledge of the Mediterranean was extended 

 amongst the Hellenic races. True cosmical knowledge, and 

 the earliest discoveries of the Phoenicians, regarding whose 

 precise period no certain tidings have come down to us, did 

 not probably give rise to this myth of the " Islands of the 

 Blessed," the application to which was made subsequently. 

 Geographical discovery has merely embodied a phantom of 

 the imagination to which it served as a substratum. 



Later writers (as an unknown compiler of the collection of 

 wonderful relations ascribed to Aristotle, who made use of 

 Timseus, and more especially of Diodorus Siculus), have spoken 

 of " Pleasant islands," which must be supposed to be the 

 Canaries, and of the great storms to which their accidental dis- 

 covery is due. It is said that " Phoenician and Carthaginian 

 vessels, which were sailing towards the settlements already 

 then founded on the coast of Libya, were driven out to sea." 

 This event is supposed to have occurred in the early period of 

 the Tyrrhenian navigation, and in that of the contest between 

 the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians and Phoenicians. Statius Sebosus 



by Nigritians (lib. ii. p. 131), appears to indicate a very southern 

 locality ; more so, perhaps, than the crocodiles and elephants mentioned 

 by Hanno, since both these were certainly, at one period, found north 

 of the desert of Sahara, in Maurusia, and in the whole western Atlas 

 country, as is proved from Strabo, lib. xvii. p. 827; ^Elian. de Nat. 

 Anim., vii. 2 ; Plin. v. 1, and from many occurrences in the wars between 

 Home and Carthage. See, on this important subject, referring to the 

 geography of animals, Cuvier, Ossemens fossiles, 2 e"d. t. i. p. 74; and 

 Quatremere, op. cit., pp. 391-394). 

 * Herod, iii. 106. 



