Balnibarbi
Balnibarbi is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels. it was visited by Lemuel Gulliver after he was rescued by the people of the flying island of Laputa.
Location
The location of Balnibarbi is illustrated in both the text and the map at the beginning of part III of Gulliver's Travels, though they are not consistent with each other. The map shows Balnibarbi to be an island to the east of Japan and to the northeast of Luggnagg. The text states that the kingdom of Balnibarbi is part of a continent which extends itself "eastward to that unknown tract of America westward of California and northward of the Pacific Ocean", and places it southeast of Luggnagg, which is "situated to the North-West" Gulliver gives his last known position (taken the morning “an hour before” he was captured by the pirates who set him adrift) as 46N, 183(E) (i.e. east of Japan, south of the Aleutian Islands) and was picked up by the inhabitants of Laputa just 5 days later, having drifted south-south-east down a chain of small rocky islands Gulliver also tells us that the island of Laputa flies by the “magnetick virtue” of certain minerals in the ground of Balnibarbi and does not extend more than four miles above, and six leagues beyond, beyond the limit of the kingdom. He states the Pacific coast, where lies the port of Maldonada, is not above one hundred and fifty miles from the capital, Lagado.
Balnibarbi (trilobite)
Balnibarbi is an extinct genus of trilobites in the family Olenidae. They are known from fossils excavated in Norway. They lived during the early part of the Arenig stage of the Ordovician Period, a faunal stage that occurred about 479 to 472 million years ago.
The genus is ancestral to, and co-existed sympatrically with, the better-known Cloacaspis.
It was named for the fictional country of Balnibarbi featured in Gulliver's Travels, a place "populated by eccentric natural philosophers."
Species include:
