﻿46 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



iosity-shop of figures, not necessarily the result of one hand or one 

 period, but these are now fast lapsing into invisibility. There is some- 

 thing trivial and childish in most Indian pictorial work and this 

 Taunton River contribution seems a rather aggravated case. It could 

 emanate only from an infantile rudimentary people. To charge it 

 or anything like it on those splendid Icelanders whose saga-literature 

 remains a wonder of the world seems sufficiently absurd. 



One objection, sometimes urged overhastily, requires, however, 

 a little qualification. It has been said that no rock inscription or 

 pictograph could last so long on our Atlantic coast. The present 

 rate of wearing away by tide-water would ensure obliteration no 

 doubt in much less than the nine hundred years between Thorfinn's 

 time and our own, but that rate depends on present conditions, which 

 did not obtain when the pictographs were out of reach of the tide, 

 as they must have been at first and long afterward. This, of course, 

 does not establish nine hundred years of life for them, but only 

 that nine hundred years of life may not be impossible. In 1700, 

 though then partly tide-washed, they were still " deeply engraved " 

 according to Cotton Mather. 1 



On Cape Cod, not far away, some forgotten hearthstones have been 

 dug up as Norse witnesses ; likewise a copper plate averred by E. N. 

 Horsford 2 to bear " the legend of Kialarness." They have been almost 

 restored to oblivion. The same must be said of like unconvincing 

 evidences occasionally reported from various points around that bay. 



The Charles River Valley near Boston is a region more zealously 

 championed ; especially in the Norumbega pamphlets of E. N. 

 Horsford, 3 whose tablet on his pretty " Tower of Norumbega " near 

 Roberts station may be styled a new birth of history as the facts 

 ought to have been. But such matters can hardly be settled in 

 that way. We are given positively the dimensions and industries 

 of Wineland as a nation, the name and site of its capital city, the 

 exact part taken by the several leading explorers and founders, 

 and a variety of miscellaneous information, eminently desirable if 

 true, and at all events entertaining. In tracing the sources of the 

 various items it is regretted that this learned and estimable investi- 

 gator was not more thorough in securing basic knowledge for his 

 conclusions. 



Quoted in E. M. Bacon's "Narragansett Bay". 

 2 E. N. Horsford: The Landfall of Leif, p. 31. 



3 The Defences of Norumbega, The Landfall of Leif, The Discovery of the 

 Ancient City, The Problem of the Northmen, etc. 



