According to Bailly, the present nations of Asia are heirs of an anterior people, who understood Astronomy perfectly. Those Chinese, those Hindoos, so renowned for their learning, would thus have been mere depositaries; we should have to deprive them of the title of inventors. Certain astronomical facts, found in the annals of those southern nations, appear to have belonged to a higher latitude. By these means we discover the true site on the globe of the primitive people, proving against the received opinion that learning came southward from the north.
Bailly also found that the ancient fables, considered physically, appeared to belong to the northern regions of the earth.
In 1779, Bailly published a second collection, forming a sequel to the former, and entitled Letters on the Atlantis of Plato, and on the Ancient History of Asia.
Voltaire died before these new letters could be communicated to him. Bailly did not think that this circumstance ought to make him change the form of the discussion already employed in the former series; it is still Voltaire whom he addresses.
The philosopher of Ferney thought it strange that there should be no knowledge of this ancient people, who, according to Bailly, had instructed the Indians. To answer this difficulty, the celebrated astronomer undertakes to prove that some nations have disappeared, without their existence being known to us by any thing beyond tradition. He cites five of these, and in the first rank the Atlantidæ.
Aristotle said that he thought Atlantis was a fiction of Plato's: "He who created it also destroyed it, like the walls that Homer built on the shores of Troy, and then made them disappear." Bailly does not join in this skepticism. According to him, Plato spoke seriously to the Athenians of a learned, polished people, but destroyed and forgotten. Only, he totally repudiates the idea of the Canaries being the remains of the ancient country of the Atlantidæ, and now engulfed. Bailly rather places that nation at Spitzbergen, Greenland, or Nova Zembla, whose climate may have changed. We should also have to seek for the Garden of the Hesperides near the Pole; in short, the fable of the Phœnix may have arisen in the Gulf of the Obi, in a region where we must suppose the sun to have been annually absent during sixty-five days.
It is evident, in many passages, that Bailly is himself surprised at the singularity of his own conclusions, and fears that his readers may rather regard them as jokes. He therefore exclaims, "My pen would not find expressions for thoughts which I did not believe to be true." Let us add that no effort is painful to him. Bailly calls successively to his aid astronomy, history, supported by vast erudition, philology, the systems of Mairan, of Buffon, relatively to the heat appertaining to the earth. He does not forget, using his own words, "that in the human species, still more sensitive than curious, more anxious for pleasure than for instruction, nothing pleases generally, or for a long time, unless the style is agreeable; that dry truth is killed by ennui!" Yet Bailly makes few proselytes; and a species of instinct determines men of science to despise the fruits of so persevering a labour; and D'Alembert goes so far as to tax them with poverty, even with hollow ideas, with vain and ridiculous efforts; he goes so far as to call Bailly, relatively to his letters, the illuminated brother. Voltaire is, on the contrary, very polite and very academical in his communications with our author. The renown of the Brahmins is dear to him; yet this does not prevent his discussing closely the proofs, the arguments of the ingenious astronomer. We could also now enter into a serious discussion. The mysterious veil that in Bailly's time covered the East, is in great part raised. We now know the Astronomy of the Chinese and the Hindoos in all its detail. We know up to what point the latter had carried their mathematical knowledge. The theory of central heat has in a few years made an unhoped-for progress; in short, comparative philology, prodigiously extended by the invaluable labours of Sacy, Rémusat, Quatremère, Burnouf, and Stanislaus Julien, have thrown strong lights on some historical and geographical questions, where there reigned before a profound darkness. Armed with all these new means of investigation, it might easily be established that the systems relative to an ancient unknown people, first creator of all the sciences, and relative to the Atlantidæ, rest on foundations devoid of solidity. Yet, if Bailly still lived, we should be only just in saying to him, as Voltaire did, merely changing the tense of a verb, "Your two books were, Sir, treasures of the most profound erudition and the most ingenious conjectures, adorned with an eloquence of style, which is always suitable to the subject."
FIRST INTERVIEW OF BAILLY WITH FRANKLIN.—HIS ENTRANCE INTO THE FRENCH ACADEMY IN 1783.—HIS RECEPTION.—DISCOURSE.—HIS RUPTURE WITH BUFFON.
Bailly became the particular and intimate friend of Franklin at the end of 1777. The personal acquaintance of these two distinguished men began in the strangest manner.