40 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



war, which the Saga says was employed by the Skrallings in their 

 fight with Karlsefne. 



It is said, " Karlsef ne's men saw that they raised up on a pole a 

 very large ball, something like a sheep's paunch, and of a blue color ; 

 this they swung from the pole over Karlsefne's men upon the ground, 

 and it made a great noise as it fell down. This caused great fear with 

 Karlsefne and his men." The statement at first appears curious and 

 almost childish ; yet in Schoolcraft's work on the Indians (vol. i, p. 

 83) may be found a description of a similar engine employed in the 

 ancient times, when the red-man used to sew up a round bowlder in 

 the skin of an animal, and hang it upon a pole borne by several war- 

 riors, which, being swung against a group of men, did great execution. 

 The Skrsellings may, therefore, have acquired the idea in their fights 

 with the more skillful red-man then pushing his way into their terri- 

 tory. Pursued by a superior force, we may conchide that the Skrsel- 

 lings retreated into the north. Dr. Abbott himself is of this opinion, 

 saying, " When, also, we consider that the several conditions of glacial 

 times were largely those of Greenland and Arctic America, and that 

 there is unbroken land communication between the desolate regions of 

 the latter and our OAvn more favored land, and, more important than 

 all, that there now dwells in this ice-clad country a race which, not 

 only in the distant past, but until recently if they do not now, used 

 stone implements of the rudest jDattern it is natural to infer that the 

 traces of a people found here, under circumstances that demonstrate a 

 like condition of the country during their occuj^ancy, are really traces 

 of the same people." 



That the country as far south as New Jersey was formerly adapted 

 to boreal tribes is evident from the fact that the walrus has been 

 found at Long Branch, while the great auk formerly flourished around 

 the borders of Mount Desert in Maine. Dr. Henry Rink, who for so 

 many years superintended the Danish interests in Greenland, and who 

 studied the question without any reference to the glacial man, reached 

 the conclusion that the "Esquimaux appear to have been the last 

 wave of an aboriginal American race, which has spread over the con- 

 tinent from more genial regions, following principally the rivers and 

 watercourses, and continually yielding to the tribes behind them, until 

 they have at last peopled the seacoast." Originally their distribution 

 was very wide, and their language prevails to-day from Greenland to 

 Labrador and the northeastern corner of Siberia. Professor Dawkins 

 holds that the paleolithic cave-dwellers of Europe were of the same 

 race as the Esquimaux or Innuit, though no such connection can be 

 shown between them as exists between the ancient Skrasllings and the 

 Esquimaux. 



The Icelandic records prove that the conflicts begun with the 

 Skrsellings in the eleventh century in New England were renewed 

 in the fourteenth in Greenland. Possibly it is to the Skrajllings that 



