in Vinland; but it is also recorded that in Iceland during a certain winter there was no snow. If the climate of Greenland was milder in those days, so it may have been with Labrador. Coincidences of name amount to almost as little. The name of Wood's Hole, on the coast of Massachusetts, was for a time altered to Wood's Holl, to correspond to the Norse name for hill. Mount Hope Bay, commonly derived from the Indian Montaup, has been carried further back, and has been claimed to represent the Hóp where Leif's booths were built, although the same Indian word occurs in many other places. All history shows that nothing is less to be relied upon than these analogies. How unanswerable seemed the suggestion of the old traveller Howell that the words “elf” and “goblin" represented the long strife between Guelf and Ghibelline in Italy, until it turned out that “elf" and "goblin" were much the older words!

There are scarcely two interpreters who agree as to the places visited by the Northmen, and those who are surest in their opinions are usually those who live farthest from the points described. Professor Rafn and Professor Horsford found Vinland along the coast of New England; Professor Rask, the former's contemporary, found it in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, or Labrador. The latter urged, with much reason, that it was far easier to discover wild grapes in Nova Scotia than to meet Eskimo in what is now Rhode Island; and that the whole story of the terror of the Skraelings before the bull indicates an island people like those of Newfoundland or Prince Edward Island, and certainly not the New England Indians, who were familiar with the moose, and might have

seen the buffalo. He might also have added, what was first pointed out by J. Elliot Cabot, that the repeated voyages from Greenland to Vinland, and the perfect facility with which successive explorers found the newly discovered region, indicate some spot much nearer Greenland than Mount Hope Bay, which would have required six hundred miles of intricate and dangerous coast navigation, without chart or compass, in order to reach it. Again, Rafn finds it easy to place the site of Leif's booths at Bristol, Rhode Island, and M. Gravier, a Frenchman, writing in 1874, has not a doubt upon the subject. But a sail from Fall River to Newport, or, indeed, a mere study of the map, will show any dispassionate person that the description given by the sagas has hardly anything in common with the Rhode Island locality. The sagas describe an inland lake communicating with the sea by a shallow river only accessible at high-tide, whereas Mount Hope Bay is a broad expanse of salt water opening into the still wider gulf of Narragansett Bay, and communicating with the sea by a passage wide and deep enough for the navies of the world to enter. Even supposing the Northmen to have found their way in through what is called the Seaconnet Passage, the description does not apply much better to that. Even if it did, these hardy sailors must have recognized, the moment they reached the bay itself, that they had come in at the back door, not at the front; and the main access to the ocean must instantly have revealed itself. The whole interpretation, which seems so easy to transatlantic writers, is utterly rejected by Professor Henry Mitchell, sometime director of the Coast Survey. And the same vagueness and indefiniteness mark all the descriptions

of the Northmen. Nothing is more difficult than to depict in words with any accuracy in an unscientific age the features of a low and monotonous sea-shore; and this, with the changes undergone by the coast of southern New England during nine hundred years, renders the identification of any spot visited by the Northmen practically impossible.

The Maine Historical Society has reprinted a map of the North Atlantic made by the Icelander Sigurd Stephanius in the year 1570, and preserved by the

Scandinavian historian Torfaeus in his Gronlandia Antiqua (1706). In this map all that is south of Greenland, including Vinland, is a part of one continent. Helluland and Marckland appear upon it, and

Vinland is a promontory extending forth from the land of the Skraelings. But whether this abrupt cape is meant to represent Cape Cod, as some would urge, or the far more conspicuous headlands of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, must be left to conjecture. The fact that it is in the same latitude with the southern part of England would indicate the more northern situation; and it is to be noted that all these promontories are depicted as mountainous—a character which the Northmen, accustomed to the heights of Iceland and Greenland, could hardly have applied to what must have seemed to them the trivial elevations of Cape Cod or Mount Hope Bay. A sand-hill two hundred feet high would hardly have done duty for a mountain on a map made in Iceland. But the chaotic geography of the whole map-in which England is thrown out into mid- ocean, Iceland appears nearly as large as England, one of the Shetland Islands is as large as Ireland, and the imaginary island of Frisland is fully displayed-affords a sufficient warning against taking too literally any details contained in the sagas. If learned Icelanders were so utterly unable, five centuries later, to depict the Europe which they knew so well, how could their less - learned ancestors have given any accurate topography of the America which they knew so little? They did not give it; but the same activity of imagination which enabled Professor Rafn to find the name of Thorwald in an Indian inscription might well permit him to identify Krossaness with Sound Point and Vinland with Nantucket.

Unless authentic Norse remains are hereafter unearthed, there is very little hope of ever identifying a single spot where the Vikings landed or a single in

let ever furrowed by their keels. But that these bold rovers in sailing westward discovered lands beyond Greenland is as sure as anything can be that rests on sagas and traditions only-as sure, that is, as most things in the earliest annals of Europe. They discovered America; what part of America is of little consequence. They discovered it without clear intention and by a series of what might almost be called coasting voyages, stretching from Norway to Scotland, from Scotland to Iceland, and thence to Greenland, and at last to the North American continent, each passage extending but a few hundred miles, though those miles lay through stormy and icy seas. They made these discoveries simply as adventurers. There is nothing in their achievement worthy to be compared with the great deed of Columbus, when he formed with deliberate dignity a heroic purpose and set sail across an unknown sea upon the faith of a conviction. As compared with him and his companions, the Vikings seem but boys beside men.