Naturally the origin of the word has been found a fascinating problem. Ever since Formaleoni,[250] near the close of the eighteenth century, called attention to the delineation of Antillia in Bianco’s map of 1436, discussed below, as indicating some knowledge of America, there have been those to urge the claims of the suppositional lost Atlantis instead. The two island names certainly begin with “A” and utilize “t,” “l,” and “i” about equally; but “Atlantis” comes so easily out of “Atlas,” and the great mountain chain marches so conspicuously down to the sea in all early maps, that the derivation of the former may be called obvious; whereas you cannot readily or naturally turn “Atlas” into “Antillia,” and there is no evidence that any one ever did so. As to geographical items, both have been located in the great western sea; but that is true of many other lands, real or fanciful. Something has been made of the elongated quadrilateral form of Antillia; but Humboldt points out[251] that in the description transmitted by Plato this outline is ascribed to a particular district in Atlantis, not to the great island as a whole, and that, even if it could be understood in the latter sense, there seems no reason why a fragment surviving the great cataclysm should repeat the configuration of Atlantis as a whole. There seems a total lack of any direct evidence, or any weighty inferential evidence, of the derivation of Antillia from Atlantis. HUMBOLDT’S HYPOTHESIS Humboldt, in rejecting this hypothesis, advanced another, which is picturesque and ingenious but hardly better supported.[252] His choice is “Al-tin,” Arabic for “the dragon.” Undoubtedly Arabs navigated to some extent some parts of the great Sea of Darkness, and these monsters were among its generally credited terrors. The hardly decipherable inscriptions in the neighborhood of an island on the map of the Pizigani of 1367[253] (Fig. 2), as we have seen (Ch. VI), seem to cite Arabic experience in proof of perils from _fulvos_ (krakens) rising from the depths of the sea, coupling dragons with them in the same legend and illustrating it by a picture of a kraken dragging one seaman overboard from a ship in distress, while a dragon high overhead flies away with another. It is even true that Arabic tradition established a dragon on at least one island as a horrible oppression, long ago happily ended, and that another island (perhaps more than one) was known as the Island of the Dragon. But in all this there is nothing to connect dragons with Antillia, and that most hideous medieval fancy is out of all congruity with the fair and almost holy repute of this island as the place of refuge of the last Christian ante-Moorish monarch of Spain in the hour of his despair and as the new home of the seven Portuguese bishops with their following.