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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 125 wards to the Cassiterides where they obtained tin, and to the Prussian coast from whence they brought amber; and southwards, past Madeira, to the Cape de Verde Islands. They visited, among other places, the Canaries, and were struck by the appearance of the lofty Peak of Teneriffe, enhanced by it rising immediately from the sea. Through the colonies which they sent to Greece, and especially through that which came under Cadmus to Boootia, the notice of this mountain rising high above the region of clouds, and of the 'Fortunate Islands,' adorned with fruits of every kind, and especially with the golden orange, spread into Greece. Here the tradition was propagated by the songs of the bards, and thus reached Homer. He speaks in the Odyssey (i. 52) of an' Atlas who knows all the depths of the sea, and who supports the great pillars which divide heaven and earth from each other.' He speaks, too, in the Iliad, of the Elysian fields, which he describes as a lovely land in the west. (ll. iv. 561.) Hesiod expresses himself in a similar manner respecting Atlas, whom he makes a neighbor of the nymphs, the daughters of Hesperus. (Theog. v. 517.) He calls the Elysian fields, which he places at the western limit of the earth, the Islands of the Blest. (Op. et dies, v. 167.) Later poets have added further embellishments to these myths of Atlas, of the Respericles, their golden apples, and the Islands of the Blest, assigned as the dwelling· place of the virtuous after death; and have combined with them the expeditions of the Tyran god of trade, Melicertes (the Grecian Hercules). "The Greeks only began at a very late date to rival the Phrenici: ms and Carthaginians in navigation. They visited the coasts of the Atlantic, it is true, but never appear to have penetrated far into the ocean. I doubt whether they ever saw the Canaries and the Peak of Tcneri:ffe. They believed that Atlas, which their poets and legends described as a very high mountain placed at the western limit of the earth, must be sought on the west coast of Africa. It was placed there also by their later geographers, Strabo, Ptolemy, and others. As there is not any single mountain distinguished by its elevation in north-western Africa, the true situation of l\Iount Atlas has been a subject of perplexity; and it has been sought, sometimes on the coast, sometimes in the interior, sometimes near the Mediterranean, 11* |