d the dominion of
the sea be wrested from their hands; and so they issued a decree that no
one, under penalty of death, should thereafter sail thither." This
passage is quoted, not merely with a claim that it refers to the
Continent of America, but for the purpose of showing how carefully the
Phoenician people, whether Asiatic, Carthagenian, or Spanish, guarded
from the great world the foreign discoveries which they had made, and
where their kindred were enjoying prosperity; and to enable us to see
how little likely their discoveries would be to come to the knowledge of
the great mass of mankind.

2. Let us look for a moment at some of the things which the ancient
Greek and Latin authors have said indicating their knowledge of the
existence of a western continent. Crates, a commentator on Homer, is
quoted by authority of Strabo, a very learned author of the century
before Christ, as saying that Homer means in his account of the western
Ethiopians the inhabitants of the Atlantis or the Hesperides, as the
unknown world of the west was then variously called.

3. Pliny also 6: 31-36, locates the western Ethiopians somewhere in the
Atlantic. This shows that Crates and Pliny believed that the great poet
Homer believed in the existence of a great continent on the western
shore of the Atlantic ocean.

4. Plato says in his Timaeus, Chapter VI.: "The sea" (the Atlantic
ocean), "was indeed navigable and had an island fronting the mouth which
you in your tongue call the Pillars of Hercules, and this island is
larger than Libya and Asia put together, and there is a passage hence
for travelers of that day to the rest of the islands, as well as from
those islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds the real
sea.[TN-1]

5. Humboldt quotes that Anaxagoras, who was born five hundred years
B. C., and was a most eminent Greek philosopher, speaks of the grand
division of the world beyond the ocean.

6. Aelian in his Variae Historiae, Book 3, Chapter 18, cites Theopompus,
an eminent Greek historian, born about three hundred years B. C., as
stating that the Meropians inhabit a large continent beyond the ocean,
in comparison with which the known world was but an island.

7. Aristotle says in Chapters 84 and 85: "Beyond the Pillars of
Hercules, they say that an inhabited island was discovered by the
Carthagenians, which abounded in forests and navigable rivers and fruits
of all kinds, distant from the continent many days' sail