Whether these fictions had an allegory for their basis, or were founded on the mistaken notions of voyagers--whether they arose in Greece, or, as the Hebrew etymology of the name Cimmerian might seem to indicate, in the east, or in Phenicia, it is certain that the images they present, transferred to the world of reality, and applied successively to various lands, and confused by contradictory explanations, have singularly embarrassed the progress of geography through many centuries. The Roman travellers thought they recognised the Fortunate Isles in a group to the west of Africa, now known as the Canaries. The philosophical fictions of Plato and Theopompus about Atlantes and Meropis have been long perpetuated in historical theories; though of course it is possible that in the numerous changes that have taken place in the surface of the earth, some ancient vast and populous island may have descended beneath the level of the sea. On the other side, the poetic imagination created the _Hyperboreans_, beyond the regions where the northern winds were generated, and according to a singular kind of meteorology, they believed them for that reason to be protected from the cold winds. Herodotus regrets that he has not been able to discover the least trace of them; he took the trouble to ask for information about them from their neighbours, the _Arimaspes_, a very clear-sighted race, though having but a single eye; but they could not inform him where the Hyperboreans dwelt. The Enchanted Isles, where the Hesperides used to guard the golden fruit, and which the whole of antiquity placed in the west, not far from the Fortunate Isles, are sometimes called Hyperborean by authors well versed in the ancient traditions. It is also in this sense that Sophocles speaks of the Garden of Phoebus, near the vault of heaven, and not far from the _sources of the night_, _i.e._ of the setting of the sun.