Talas or Atlantes occupied or conquered Europe and Africa, nay, went to America in very early times.... In Greece they became _Atalantes_, _Talautians_ of Epirus, _Aetolians_.... They gave name to Italy, _Aitala_ meaning land eminent, ... to the Atlantic Ocean, and to the great Atlantis, or America, called in the Hindu books _Atala_ or _Tala-tolo_, the fourth world, where dwelt giants or powerful men.... America is also filled with their names and deeds from Mexico and Carolina to Peru: the _Tol-tecas_, people of Tol, and Aztlan, _Otolum_ near Palenque, many towns of _Tula_ and _Tolu_; the _Talas_ of Michuacan, the _Matalans_, _Atalans_, _Tulukis_, etc., of North America.” (C. S. Rafinesque, Atlantic Journal, Philadelphia, 1832-33.) It need hardly be added that Tula has also been identified with the equally unknown and long-sought-for _ultima_ _Thule_, with the simplifying effect of bringing two streams of inquiry into one channel. Meanwhile, by a different kind of criticism, the whole question is dissipated into thin air, _Tollan_ and _Aztlan_ being resolved into names of mere mythical import, and the regions thus designated transferred from the earth to the bright domain of the sky, from which the descriptions in the legends appear to have been borrowed. See Brinton, Myths of the New World, pp. 88, 89.--K.] [17] Anahuac, according to Humboldt, comprehended only the country between the fourteenth and twenty-first degrees of north latiude. (Essai politique, tom. i. p. 197.) According to Clavigero, it included nearly all since known as New Spain. (Stor. del Messico, tom. i. p. 27.) Veytia uses it, also, as synonymous with New Spain. (Historia antigua de Méjico (Méjico, 1836), tom. i. cap. 12.) The first of these writers probably allows too little, as the latter do too much, for its boundaries. Ixtlilxochitl says it extended four hundred leagues south of the Otomi country. (Hist. Chichimeca, MS., cap. 73.) The word Anahuac signifies _near the water_. It was, probably, first applied to the country around the lakes in the Mexican Valley, and gradually extended to the remoter regions occupied by the Aztecs and the other semi-civilized races. Or possibly the name may have been intended, as Veytia suggests (Hist. antig., lib. 1, cap. 1), to denote the land between the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific.{*} {*} [This suggestion of Veytia is unworthy of attention,--refuted by the actual application and appropriateness of the name, and by the state of geographical knowledge and ideas at the period when it must have originated. A modern traveller, describing the appearance of the great plains as seen from the summit of Popocatepetl, remarks, “Even now that the lakes have shrunk to a fraction of their former size, we could see the fitness of the name given in old times to the Valley of Mexico, _Anahuac_, that is, By the water-side.” Tylor, Anahuac; or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (London, 1861), p. 270.--K.]