the Platonic Atlantis was situated in none of these places, are very entertaining.- The only question is, whether he is not chargeable with a high degree of literary prodigality in spending so much precious labour on a geographical description, which probably had no object but in the imagination of the Athenian fage; for his Atlantis may be no more than a moral romance borrowed from the Egyptians, whose allegorical genius is well known, or perhaps a poetical representation of fome astronomical fact. But let us not judge definitively on this head before we have feen the farther arguments alleged by M. BAILLY to determine the fituation of this famous island. These are the result of the hiftories, traditions, fables, monuments, religious inftitutions, festivals, languages, etymologies, that he has examined, compared, and combined, in order to establish his favourite hypothefis.

The statue of Hercules is always accompanied with two coJumns or pillars, one of which was confecrated to fire, and the other to the clouds and winds. They were, also, says our Author, sometimes called limits and boundaries as well as pillars. Now from these pillars of Hercules found in his temple at Tyre, which M. BAILLY ingeniously confiders as a monument of gratitude (a mark of the joy that is natural when one comes to the end of a long journey), he boldly concludes that the Atlantides had failed from the North to Tyre, in quest of a fruitful country and a warm fun, and had thus erected the votive pillars to the fire they had found in a funny climate, and to the favourable winds that had conducted them thither. The magic of style, the extensive erudition, and the fecundity of imagination, which diftinguish our Author, are employed in the fifteenth letter to render this conjecture palatable. He fees the Atlantides coming down from their mountains in the North with the Scythians, or under the denomination of that people, paffing the Caucasus, and falling on the kingdom of Pontus:- and it is to them he attributes the worship of the fun and moon, that was established in Phrygia, Tyre, and other eastern countries. This worship is alleged as a proof of his hypothefis; for it must have been, according to him, imported from the North, where the, beams of the fun, that burn and destroy in the hot and eaftern climates, are inestimably precious to quicken and revive the chilly inhabitants of those cold and barren regions. Асcordingly, fays he, the Greeks speak of the Hyperborean Apollo, i. e. of a foreign god, whom they had adopted into their lift of. deities; and the testivals of Adonis and Ofiris (i, e. of the fun loft and found again), could never have been invented but in those countries, which are for a long time deprived of the light and heat of that great luminary. - This notion is, however, more ingenious than folid: it is well known, that the alternatives

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natives of heat and cold are felt very sensibly in Africa and Afs at the 30th degree of latitude, and the Reader has only to caft an eye on the account given of the winters in Persia by M. Buffon, and he will fee that the fun is not always a devouring lion in that Eastern region.

In the fixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth letters, we fee the Persians descending from the same Northern mountains with the Scythians; but as the fimplicity and purity of their religious worship, and many other circumstances, diftinguish them from the Phenicians, Phrygians, and the inhabitants of Egypt, Afia Minor, Greece and Italy, M. BAILLY confiders them as the pofterity of an emigration different from that which peopled the countries now mentioned. He was therefore afraid of lofing the trace of his Atlantides among the Persians; but a man like him is never at a loss to fill up a chasm. He finds in the ancient archives of the Magi an account of a race of creatures called Dives and Peris by the Persians, and Ginn by the Arabians (of whom the Greeks made their Dios and the Romans their Divus, and we our Genii), and the traditions, however fabulous, which mention this ideal race as a superior class of beings, and present them as covered with a veil, contain evidently, if we may believe our Author, the notion of a people that once existed, and are now no more.

To confirm this farther, M. B. in his eighteenth letter, seeks for the origin of the Perfians beyond the northern borders ot Afia; and the worship of fire established in Perfia leads him thither: For how, fays he, should this artificial heat be an object of defire or gratitude in a country, where nature produces an exceffive warmth of climate? Fire, continues he, is fo far from being necessary, that it is useless in Persia, and it would be паtural to fly from it there, instead of adoring it. We have ob. served above, that this reasoning is more ingenious than folic, and that the winters in Perfia, as described by M. Buffon, render fire neither unnecessary nor useless. But our Author has recourse to other proofs of the derivation of this worship from a Northern fource: He observes that pyr, the Greek word for fire, is a Phrygian term, and that the term which is used to signify fire in the Swedish Edda (that ancient production of country where fire is indispensably necessary), is fur; and he com cludes from the identity of these two denominations, that it was a Northern people which brought fire and its denomination into Phrygia, from whence they passed into Egypt and Greece. Fire was procured, preserved, and adored, in a Northern climate, where it was necessary and comfortable; its worship defcended from thence into the Southern regions, as the torrents descend from the mountains. We cannot pretend to clothe this hypothesis with the plausibility it affumes in the work before us, from the learned detail into which our Author enters, and the ingenious combinations he employs to afcertain it; we must therefore refer the Reader to the work, and confine ourselves to a general sketch of its contents: the number of historico-fabulous relations and anecdotes contained in this and the other letters, is really striking, and discovers the most extensive reading: -We shall only observe before we leave this letter, that in the mountains North of Caucasus and of (what he calls) the great line of circumvallation that separates the South from the North of Afia, he finds the origin not only of the Perfians, who brought from those frozen climes the worship of fire, but also of the Indians and Chinese. Besides the proofs deducible from the Hanscrit, of the Brahmins being strangers in India, our Author alleges the situation of the learned city of Benares (strong arguments and weak, all is forced into the service!) which is the most Northern city of India, and lies in the neighbourhood of Thibet, from whence the river Brahma runs into the Ganges, and carried perhaps thither the Brahmins with it in time past.

After having led his Reader a wild goose chace to the foot of mount Caucafus, in order to shew him the ancestors of the Perfians, he carries him into Tartary,-he shews him there a chain of mountains, which, forming the limits between Europe and Afia, continue their direction to the Caspian sea, and lead from thence, on right and left, to the high plains of Siberia and Southern Tartary. Here our Author fixes the first refting place-the first term of the long journey of the travelling and victorious nation which he is hunting after in the dark, or with the light of mythological, geographical-fabulo-historical tapers, which, together with his own fancy (that resembles a Will with a wifp) are likely to leave the Reader as far from conviction at the end of this entertaining book, as he was, when the paradoxical hypothesis was first proposed to him.

For a moment, indeed, we thought the hypothefis proved and ascertained, when we saw at the head of the twentieth and twenty-third letters the two following promifing titles-The Discovery of a lost People-The Discovery of the Country of the Atlantides: but when we read these letters we discovered nothing but wit, amenity, erudition and eloquence,-which amused us abundantly, and that was all-for evidence we have neither seen nor felt. We learn from the first of these letters that Abulghazi, a Khan of the Usbecs, who reigned at Korasan in the last century, has written a history of his nation, which, amidst a multitude of fables, exhibits an account of the ancient Tartars, their division into the Mogul and Turkish empires, and other branches in the neighbourhood of China, as also in Bulgaria and Hungary. These Tartars furnish our Author with numerous occafions

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occasions of twisting fables to complete his system. He derives still more plausible fuccours from Mr. Pallas *, that able Naturalift, whom Catherine II. sent to observe the various aspects of Nature in the vast domain of the Russian empire. This learned man speaks of the vestiges of an ancient people who were destroyed or extinguished near the banks of the Jenifea in the environs of Krasnojarsk, This he concludes from mines that have been wrought in a remote antiquity in the mountain of Schlangenberg, and from the instruments of brass and ftone (for they had none of iron) which these ancient Miners employed to cut the rocks and other hard bodies they found in their way. Many of these instruments, such as mattocks and wedges of brass, and hammers of wood, as also knives and daggers of brass, arrows pointed with the same metal, and ornaments of various kinds in brass and gold, have been dug up from the bowels of the earth, and particularly from burial-places in these Northern regions. These facts lead our Author by various inductions to an ancient people, who practised the arts even before the difcovery of iron, which the Mongol Tartars are known to have employed in a very early period. - Our Author acknowledges that the Ruffians of Siberia make no mention of this people:no wonder-(will he say) because this people have long since been destroyed.- If you ask him how he knows that they have been destroyed? He will reason thus: People that are far enough advanced in the arts to work mines and make instruments.and ornaments of brass, must have previously built houses and cities; - but as these houses and cities have disappeared, the people muft have been destroyed by fome fatal disaster. Though the Russians have no knowledge of this people, yet we are told by M. BAILLY, that tradition has preferved their name, and that they are called by the Northern inhabitants of Siberia Tschouden or Tichoudaki. This is an excellent and fertile word in the hands of our Author; it will discover to us (fays he) the origin and emigrations of this people, and he has drawn by the ears to his affiftance a learned Strasburgher, called Oberlin, who observes + that in days of yore the Finlanders were called Ijchouden or I jchaudes, and that there are vestiges of the ancient people of Fin and, even in Switzerland and Hungary, as also a conformity between their language and that of the Greeks. Now as the Finianders, ancient defcendants of the Scythians, are the firft inhabitants of the North known to us, these little

* This voyage of M. Pallas was published in three volumes folio, in German.

+ In his letter prefixed to the curious work of MR. NILS IDMAN, Paftor at Abo, entitled, Researches concerning the ancient inhabitants of Finiand,

facts lead our Author to important conclufions, and shove him Northward for their origin, and Southward for their emigrations. This people was forgotten, because they were only known by their pacific labours, and the exercise of the useful arts, while the nations that ravaged and depopulated the earth left deep impreffions of their cruelty and injustice, and thus continue to live in the memory of mankind. The good Tschoudi would have been buried, perhaps, in eternal oblivion, had not Pallas (we mean Mr. Pallas) picked up some brazen pitch-forks and faces out of a Siberian grave, and were there not in our times a family of rank in Switzerland which (rifum teneatis, amici!) bears the name of TSCHOUDI. Be that as it may M. BAILLY is rejoiced at this discovery of a lost people. He finds the discovery infinitely curious: He cannot, indeed, tell us yet, whether this be the people that cultivated astronomy and the sciences in the remotest periods of Afiatic antiquity, for (fays he, here, lowering, unusually, his tone towards modest doubting) I warned you, that I could exhibit nothing but under the cover of a veil; he affirms, however, that the Tschoudes are very ancientthat they are near the latitude he had imagined-that they were not uninftructed, fince they wrought mines-and that they exist no more. ---However, as this good people must have had neighbours, and a language, this may offer a handle for obtaining farther information-and as M. BAILLY seems to have had a good deal of time upon his hands, he run ideally about the country comparing the present languages together, fifting fables in the hope of getting from them some grains of truth, and has thus fcraped together materials for his twenty-first letter, which is employed in treating of the Languages of the North, and the Garden of the Hesperides. In the first of these articles M. BAILLY avails himself of the labours, researches and discoveries of Leibnitz, the President de Broffes, and the laborious Court de Gebelin, the latter of whom more especially, by combining the terms of different languages, and reducing words to their primitive sounds, makes us hope for, nay has promised us, the discovery of a primitive and original language, from which all others are derived, Our Author observes, that if all the alphabets were composed of the same number of letters, it would be impoffible to come to any certain conclusion with respect to the time of their forination. But this is not the cafe: the alphabets differ, and the number of letters must be different in different nations, in proportion to their progress in knowledge and improvement. He therefore ranges the nations into families, according to their alphabets: and he forms, upon this principle, two great families, one whose alphabet contained only fixteen letters, and one whose alphabet contained twenty and upwards. To the first of these families belong the Phenicians Kk 4 in