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 ISO ANTILLIA AND THE ANTILLES be a map island which, he says, is as long as Portugal and seems curiously to borrow and copy Portugal's general form and is arranged opposite to that kingdom far beyond the Azores across a great expanse of sea. It must be remembered that ilia is the old form of ilha, found in many maps, that either would naturally be pronounced "illia," and that you cannot say "anteillia" or "anti- illia" at all rapidly without turning it almost exactly into Antillia. The "island out before," or the "opposite island," would be the natural interpretation. The latter seems preferable. Notwith- standing the great importance which must always be attached to any opinion of Humboldt's, there really seems no need to let fancy range far afield when an obvious explanation faces us in the word itself and on the maps. THE WEIMAR MAP Nordenskiold, practically applying his test of the presence of Antillia and arranging his materials in chronological order, heads his list of "The Oldest Maps of the New Hemisphere" 18 with the anonymous map preserved in the Grand Ducal library in Weimar and credited to I424. 19 But it seems that this map does not de- serve that position, for it is not entitled to the date; Humboldt, inspecting the original, made out certain fragments of words and the Roman characters for that year on a band running from south to north between the Azores and Antillia; also, in more modern ink, the date 1424 on the margin. Whatever the explana- tion, he was convinced of error by subsequent correspondence with the Weimar librarian and admitted that it was probably the work of Conde Freducci not earlier than 1481. Apart from all considerations of workmanship and map outlines, the use of "insule" instead of "insulle" and of "brandani" instead of "bran- dany" in the inscription concerning the Madeiras marks the map as almost certainly belonging to the last quarter, not the first quarter, of the fifteenth century. 18 Periplus, p. 177. 13 W. H. Babcock: Indications of Visits of White Men to America before Co- lumbus, Proc. igth Internatl. Congr. of Americanists, Held at Washington, Dec. 27- j/, IQIS, [Smithsonian Institution,] Washington, D. C., 1917. map on p. 476.