In the first place, I assume that it would be a waste of time to enter upon an elaborate confutation of the traditional identifications, which the pardonable ambition of after-times has devised for the various points of the wanderings. According to those expository figments, we must believe that the land of the Cyclops is an island, that it is the same island which reappears at a later date as Thrinacie, that Æolia is Stromboli in sight of that island of the Cyclops, (though it took Ulysses nine days of fair wind to sail from it to within sight of Ithaca,) and that Ulysses could sail straight across the sea from Æolia to Ithaca. We must look for the Læstrygones and their perpetual day in the latitudes of the Mediterranean. We must either place the ocean northward, (but wholly without any prototype in nature,) and the under-world on the west coast of Italy, where there is no stream whatever, and seek, too, for fogs and darkness in the choicest atmospheres of the world; or else we must remove the Ocean-mouth to a distance about four times as far from the island of Circe, as that island is from Greece, whereas the poem evidently presumes their comparative proximity. But in truth, it is useless to go on accumulating single objections, for it is not upon these that the confutation principally depends. The confutation of these pardonable but idle traditions rests on broader grounds. The grounds are such as really these, that in no one particular do these Italian fables--for such I must call them, notwithstanding the partial countenance they receive from the chaotic and seemingly adulterated parts of the Theogony of Hesiod[545]--satisfy the letter of the text of Homer; that in the attempt to give it a geographical character, they misconceive its spirit; and that they oblige us to override and nullify not only the facts of actual geography, for that we might do without violating any law of reason and likelihood under the conditions of the case, but also the positive indications which Homer has given us from phenomena that lay within his knowledge and experience. In fact, they would oblige us to condemn Homer as geographically unworthy of trust, within the sphere of the every day life and resort of the Greeks, as well as in regions, which he and his countrymen never visited. [545] Hes. Theog. 1011-15. And the result of all the violence thus done to Homer would be, that we should have sacrificed at once his language and his imagination, in the attempt to struggle with contradictions to the actual geography which defy every attempt at reconciliation. At the outset, according to my view, both admissions must be made, and principles must be laid down, as cardinal and essential to the conduct of the inquiry we have now in hand. ~_Dislocation of actual nature._~ It must, I think, be admitted,