1913] Andrews,— “Plants of Wineland the Good” 29 
death not long after the publication of his book. The book is of value 
as furnishing a phototypic reproduction of the saga-texts forming the 
most extensive sources of information as to the Norse voyages to 
America, enabling one then to form an independent judgment in criti- 
cal questions of textual reading without a special trip to Copenhagen. 
Further than this very considerable service it represents no noteworthy 
contribution to the problem, though including many of Storm’s results 
and offering generally a good means of orientation.! 
The first serious assault upon Storm's results is that of Fernald, who 
confines himself for the present to the botanical field where his success 
may well lead one to suspect that Storm's position is less impregnable 
than had been supposed. Storm’s botanical conclusions were that 
the wild grape may have been found by the Norsemen as far north as 
Nova Scotia, while he accepted Schübeler's hypothesis? that the 
"self-sown wheat" of the Norsemen was the wild rice (Zizania) 
of eastern America.  Fernald after reviewing the facts, present 
and historical, about the northeastern distribution of the American spe- 
cies of wild grapes doubts that the Norsemen could have found them in 
Nova Scotia, and certainly no one familiar with Fernald's knowledge of 
the distribution of our northeastern plants and his familiarity with their 
literature would question the weight of his contentions. From the 
lack of similarity either in appearance or habitat he doubts that the 
Norsemen could have called our wild rice wheat, a doubt one cannot 
but subscribe to, and he notes further that wild rice does not occur 
in Nova Scotia anyhow. From this last fact there seems no escape. 
In so far Fernald has certainly made a real contribution. But he 
does not stop with this; much of positive conclusion he offers as a 
substitute for what he has demolished. The Norse vinber did not 
mean grapes at all, but only wild currants (Ribes spp.), or perhaps 
mountain-cranberries (Vaccinium Vitis-Idaca), their “self-sown 
wheat" was a species of grass (Elymus arenarius) more closely resem- 
bling wheat, while a wood referred to by the Norsemen as mosurr was 
the white birch. These conclusions called by the author “reasonably 
certain” are by no means invulnerable to criticism. Fernald’s refer- 
ence to the unquestionable Swedish vinbär = currant and to a similar 
terminology elsewhere among the northern European peoples as well 
1 Cf. the review of Gering, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, xxiv, 84ff. 1892. 
? Schübeler was not the first to whom this idea had suggested itself, as will be noted 
further on. 
