6 DR. DANIEL WILSON. 
ancient walls with more genuine Norse sentiment in his fine ballad of “The Skeleton in 
Armour.” 
The poet, William Morris, in his “ Earthly Paradise,” represents the Vikings of the 
14th century, following the old leadings of Leif Ericson across the Atlantic in search of 
the earthly paradise :— 
“ That desired gate 
To immortality and blessed rest 
Within the landless waters of the West.” 
The time chosen by the poet is that of England’s Edward III, and still more, of 
England’s Chaucer. But in reality all memory of the land which lay beyond the waters of 
the Atlantic had faded as utterly from the minds of Europe’s mariners, in that 14th century, 
as in the older days when Plato restored a lost Atlantis to give local habitation to his ideal 
Republic ; and when the idea revived in the closing years of the 15th century, not as a 
philosophic dream, but as a legitimate induction of science: the reception whieh it met 
with from the embodied wisdom of that age, curiously illustrates the common experience 
of the pioneers in every path of novel discovery. 
To Columbus, with the well-defined faith in the spherical form of the earth which 
gave him confidence to steer boldly westward in search of the Asiatic Cipango, the existence 
of a world beyond the Atlantic was no mere possibility. So early, at least, as 1474 he had 
conceived the design of reaching Asia by sailing to the West ; and in that year he is known 
to have expounded his plans to Paolo Toscanelli, the learned Florentine physician and 
cosmographer, and to have received from him hearty encouragement. Assuming the 
world to be a sphere, he fortunately erred alike in under-estimating its size, and in 
over-estimating the extent to which the continent of Asia stretched away to the east- 
ward. In this way he diminished the distance between the coasts of Europe and Asia; 
and so, when at length he sighted the new-found world of the west, so far from dreaming 
of another ocean wider than the Atlantic between him and the object of his quest, he 
unhesitatingly designated the natives of Guanahani, or San Salvador, “ Indians,” in the 
confident belief that this was an outlying coast of Asiatic India. Nor was his reasoning 
unsound. He sought, and would have found a western route to that old east by the very 
track he followed, had no American continent intervened. It was not till his third voyage 
that the great Admiral for the first time beheld the new continent,—not indeed the Asiatic 
mainland, nor even our northern continent,—but South America, and the embouchures of 
the Orinoco river, with its mighty volume of fresh water, proving beyond dispute that it 
drained an area of vast extent, and opened up access far into the interior of a new world. 
Columbus had realized his utmost anticipations, and died in the belief that he had 
reached the eastern shores of Asia. Nor is the triumph in any degree lessened by this 
assumption. The dauntless navigator, pushing on ever westward into the mysterious waters 
of the unexplored Atlantic in search of the old East, presents the most marvellous example 
of pure faith that science can adduce. To estimate all that that faith implied, we have to 
turn back to a period when his unaccomplished purpose rested solely on that sure and well- 
grounded faith in the demonstrations of science. 
In the city of Salamanca, there assembled in the Dominican convent of San Esteban, 
in the year 1487, a learned and orthodox conclave, summoned by Prior Fernando de Talavera, 
