178 SPORT IN NORWAY. 
all the care that has been taken of them, they have 
greatly diminished, and it is to be feared still continue 
to do so every year. | 
As above stated, a very large quantity of down used 
to be exported from Iceland, but entirely for the 
Danish market. In the year 1750, the company in 
that island sold as large a quantity as amounted to 
3745 banco dollars. The relative value of clean and 
uncleaned down in those days may be ascertained from 
the followmg computation, that the former was valued 
at forty-five fish per one pound, and the latter at six- 
een fish per one pound. 
The earliest mention that I can find of eider-down in 
any English writings occurs in “The Description of 
Europe, and the Voyages of Othere and Wulfstan,” 
by Alfred the Great. Otherus, who was a Norwegian 
nobleman, speaking of the Finns and Biarmians, says 
that the revenues of the nobles “chiefly consisted 
in skins of animals, down, and whalebone,” and that 
‘some of the richest proprietors had to pay as much as 
forty bushels of down.” 
The use of eider-down was believed, in the early 
part of the last century, to be excessively injurious to 
the health, producing epileptic seizures ; which opinion 
is refuted by Bartholin, a Danish writer on medicine, 
who says: “ Neither ought that idle report to frighten 
us, that epilepsy is brought on by the use of these 
