ATLAS, king of Mauritania, is supposed to have been contemporary with Moses. From his taking observations of the stars on a mountain top, the poets represented him as turned into the mountain which bore his name, and sustaining the heavens on his shoulders. Being an excellent astronomer, and the first who taught the doctrine of the sphere, they tell us that his daughters were turned into stars; seven of them forming the Pleiades, and other seven the Hyades. A good account of Atlas, under his different aspects, may be found in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. i.