Jean Silvain Bailly (1736-1793) was born in Paris and became a renowned astronomer, in which capacity he computed an orbit for Halley’s Comet and studied the four satellites of Jupiter that were then known to science.

He was a friend of the famous mathematician Laplace and also of Voltaire to whom he wrote his Letters on Atlantis published in 1778. In it, Bailly proposed that the region around Spitzbergen in the Arctic Sea was the location of Atlantis; an idea allegedly supported by Voltaire. Bailly’s view was based on the theory of his contemporary Buffon who had suggested that the earth had originally an interior fire that gradually cooled. While this fire burned the northern latitudes were much warmer providing an ideal environment in which Atlantis could flourish. When the fire cooled the Atlanteans moved south. Bailly suggested that this migration brought them to Mongolia.

In 1885 Dr W. F. Warren published a book, Paradise Found^[078] that proposed that the beginnings of the human race started at the North Pole and had been inundated at the time of the Deluge. There has been little interest in this idea since then

Bailly was also a politician and became the first mayor of Paris. Unfortunately, he was caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution and ended his days on the guillotine.