The coasts of illusion

The geography, anthropology, and natural history of this volume present a world a little different from that which is outlined in modern text-books and yet one that is familiar....

Enveloping old stories of legendary lands and peoples as with an outer husk are beliefs which relate to the world as a whole. These concern the shape of the earth, the texture o...

The progress of knowledge has been an advance from poetry to prose. In part it has consisted in forgetting the things that were not so. Through most of the story of mankind ever...

Much of the literature of marvel relates to real animals. The savage could see no great difference between them and himself; that their bodies were unlike his did not seem impor...

In the world that was, the fabulous animals that roved the land were creatures of unusual interest, though of limited number. More species were to be found in the deep. Thither,...

For the most part the winged creatures of fable are exiles from mythologies broken down or forgotten. They are imperfect and confused embodiments of the phenomena of the heavens...

The dragon of pagan and early Christian legend was a winged crocodile with a serpent’s tail. As the word is used by travelers, often a crocodile or a snake rather than a fabulou...

Belief that the sea was in every respect like the land, and that its very waves were only a thicker atmosphere, was the main source of marine fable. In Celtic story, for example...

In his _True History_ Lucian relates what he is at pains to point out is a fictitious voyage to the moon and to various isles of the outer seas. Grotesque half-human beings peop...

The tail is a symbol of the animal nature. Stories of tailed humans are found all over the world. They signify a belief that certain races of men are descended from the apes, or...

It was left to the pygmy to revenge all of the creatures of fable upon incredulous mankind. He was doubted, yet he is. Not until some fifty years ago would the learned doubters...

Men gave up with regret, and not so long ago, and not until they had ransacked all the horizons of geography, the belief that somewhere in the world there is a state of warrior...

Whether there have been Amazon states or no, there have been Amazon queens--warrior women who knew how to lead and whom men were willing to follow. The portrait gallery of histo...

Among the peoples of prodigy there were races without deformity and yet set apart from other men by their peculiar habits or habitat, or, as in the case of the giants of geograp...

Not until yesterday did men encompass the earth. But their minds were always more adventurous than their feet, and from the beginning, almost, the sense of remote horizons was i...

There are countries whose boundaries have not been fixed by armies or treaties, nor their ways marked out by trade. The dreams of men have made them. Their substance is reality,...

“The thirteenth day of May we passed by the Island of Paris, and the Island of the bankes of Helicon, and the Island called Ditter, where are many boares and the women bee witch...

In some of its moods the sea presents itself as a symbol of eternity. For ages it was more than the symbol; it was eternity itself. Men shrank from contemplation of it, as they...

If there were no Sargasso Sea there would still have been a legend of one to satisfy the demand of the mind, in a world of change and motion, for a place where there was neither...

Under the Sargasso Sea, if a few accomplished thinkers, a somewhat larger number of speculative scientists, and a host of dreamers are right, lies the lost Atlantis. This legend...

The high plateau of Cundinamarca in the interior of Colombia was once an inland sea. Its vestiges remain in small lakes which the Indians held sacred, and into which they cast o...

The search for El Dorado was the greatest of the dream quests of Spain. It was not the first, it was not the last. Along with lesser ventures without number Spain sought certain...

The traditional world, like the modern world, is a fabric woven of many stuffs and colors, and patched with strange materials, some old, some almost new. If one wonders how it w...

When the travel stories of mankind were first set down in writing the list was already nearly complete. Little was added afterward until the modern age began the systematic coll...

It has been well for men that they have been citizens of two worlds--the traditional world and the world of reality. Whatever harm they have suffered in either has come from but...