Voltaire, indeed, had read Bailly’s work pen in hand, and he proposed to the illustrious astronomer some queries, which proved both his infinite perspicacity, and wonderful variety of knowledge.  Bailly then felt the necessity of developing some ideas which in his History of Ancient Astronomy were only accessories to his principal subject.  This was the object of the volume that he published in 1776, under the title of Letters on the Origin of the Sciences and of the People of Asia, addressed to M. de Voltaire.  The author modestly announced that “to lead the reader by the interest of the style to the interest of the question discussed,” he would place at the head of his work three letters from the author of Merope, and he protested against the idea that he had been induced to play with paradoxes.

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 Atlantidae.

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 Atlantidae, 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 Phoenix 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.