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Vineland, might have been used as an ornamental timber, 
various passages were translated from the Icelandic, which 
were accompanied by the opinion of the editor of the Anti- 
quitates Americane, from which it appeared that the mazer 
was a kind of maple, a tree which still flourishes in New 
England ; and this opinion was further supported by a line 
from Spenser’s Fairy Queen, and by the etymological simi- 
larity of the word mazer to the Latin acer. 
3. In reference to an inscription on the Assonet Rock, in 
Massachusetts, the author alluded to the improbability that 
Thorfinn Karlsefne—the limit of whose discoveries is sup- 
posed to be marked by the rock—would have omitted all men- 
tion of his own name in recording them; and showed that 
certain letters, on the supposed absence of which another 
theory had been formed, were present in the most approved 
copies of the inscription, three drawings of which were ex- 
hibited to the Academy. 
Mr. Downes in the second place, propounded his conjec- 
ture respecting the future discoveries of the Northern Anti- 
quaries in the field of American research. From the simi- 
larity both in spelling and meaning of Haiti, “ highlands,” 
(the restored name of St. Domingo, or Hispaniola,) to the Ice- 
landic local designation Heithi, as well as that of Bohio, “ the 
house,” (another name of Haiti,) to the Icelandic bud, (the 
English “ booth,”) also used as a local designation in that 
language, he inferred that the Northmen may have visited 
the island; and he showed, from the northern languages, that 
the final d, being mute, occasioned no difficulty. He sup- 
ported his conjecture by adducing the authority of Doctor 
Barton, cited by an American correspondent of the editor of 
the Antiquitates Americanz, as to the existence of rocks simi- 
lar to that of Asonet, in the confines of the rivers Lata and 
Maragnon, in South America, on which, however, it would be 
premature to lay much stress, The probability of a Norse 
discovery of the West Indies he maintained from some par- 
