36 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
on the Labrador coast, and effected some brief settlement on more than one point further 
south. The incidents are full of interest for us, but the names of Bjarni Herjulfson and Lief 
the son of Eric the Red, are associated with very vague traces of this first authenticated 
European discovery of the western continent. 
The part played by the Scandinavian stock in European history proves their abundant 
aptitude to have been the organizers of a Northland of their own in the New World. The 
Northmen lingered behind, in their first home in the Scandinavian peninsula, while other 
tribes from the Baltic first wasted and then revolutionized the Roman world. But they 
were nursing a vigorous youth, which ere long, as pagan Dane, and then as Norman, 
stamped a new character on medieval Europe. Their presence in the New World rests 
on indubitable evidence; but the very definiteness of its character in their inhospitable 
northern retreat helps to destroy all faith in any mere conjectural fancies relative to their 
settlement on points along the Atlantic seaboard which they are supposed to have visited. 
So far as Greenland is concerned, they left there indisputable literate records of their colo- 
nization of the region to which, in contrast to the Iceland from whence they came, they 
gave the inapt name it still retains. The runic inscriptions brought to Copenhagen 
in 1831 not only determine the sites of settlements effected by the companions and 
successors of Eric, the founder of the first Greenland colony in A.D. 986; but they 
serve to show the kind of evidence to be looked for, alike to the north and the south of 
the St. Lawrence, if any traces yet survive of their having not only visited, but attempted 
to colonize the old Helluland, or Newfoundland, Markland, or Nova Scotia, and Vinland, or 
New England. Their genuine memorials are not less definite than those left by the Romans 
in Gaul or Britain; and corresponding traces of them in the assumed Vinland and else- 
where in the United States, have been perseveringly, but vainly, sought for. The Assonet, 
or Dighton Rock, on the Taunton river, Massachusetts, need not now be reproduced. Its 
fanciedrunes have long since been abandoned as a credulous figment. As to the Huidærk 
inscription, professedly found in 1867, graven on a rock on the river Potomac, it may be 
noted, in passing, as an ingenious hoax fashioned out of the genuine Greenland inscrip- 
tions, reading: HIR HUILIR SYASY FAGRHARDR AIRSTFIRTHINGR IKI A KILDI SYSTR THORG 
SAMFETHRA HALFTHRIGR GLED GOD SAL HENAR. Then follows what its interpreter rendered 
the date 1051.* 
Runic inscriptions on the New England seaboard, and so far south as the Potomac, 
would, if genuine, give an entirely novel aspect to our study of Pre-Columbian Ameri- 
can history, with all its possibilities of older intercourse with the eastern hemisphere. But 
it is the same whether we seek for traces of American colonization in the 10th or the 15th 
century, in so far as all native history is concerned. They equally little suffice to furnish 
evidence of relationship, in blood, language, arts or customs, between any people of the 
eastern hemisphere and the native American races. We are indeed tempted from time to 
time to review indications suggestive of an Asiatic or other old-world source for the 
American aborigines ; and in nearly every system of ethnical classification they are, with 
good reason, classed as Mongolidæ ; but if their pedigree is derived from an Asiatic 
stock, the evidence has yet to be marshalled which shall place on any well-established 


* Washington Union, June, 1867. 
Vide Canadian Journal, N.S., vol. xii., p. 140, 
