materials for erecting plausible and frivolous Systems. He hath found the art to apply to his own country a multitude of passages in ancient authors, who probably had never so much as heard of its name. According to him Sweden is the Atlantis of which Plato speaks, and for this reason he assumed that word for the title of his book. He makes no doubt but Japhet himself came thither with his family, and he undertakes to prove the antiquity of the Scandinavians by the expeditions, which according to him they have undertaken in the remotest ages[1]. The first of these he places in the time of Serug, in the year of the world 1900: the second under the direction of Hercules in the interval between the years 2200, and 2500. He lays great stress upon the conformity which is found between the names, manners, and customs of certain nations of the South and those of the North, to prove that the former had been subdued by the latter; which he affirms could never have been done, if Scandinavia had not been for a long time back overcharged, as it were, with the number of its inhabitants. It doubtless cannot be expected that I should go out of my way to encounter such an hypothesis, as this: it is
- ↑ See Ol. Rudbeck. Atlantica, cap. xxxv.
