ICELAND: ITS HISTORY AND INHABITANTS." 



By Herr Jon Stefansson, Ph. D. 



Geographically and geologically Iceland is part of — a continuation 

 of — the British Isles, for it is situated on the same submarine moun- 

 tain ridge, stretching from southeast to northwest across the North 

 Atlantic, the average depth on it being 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet, while 

 north and south of it 12,000 feet is the average depth reached by 

 sounding. According to Prof. James Geikie, land connection be- 

 tween Greenland and the British Isles must have existed in Cenozoic 

 times, for relics of the same Tertiary flora are found in Scotland, 

 the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland. The deposits in which this 

 fossil flora occurs are associated with great sheets of volcanic rocks. 

 This so-called Iceland ridge (or Wyville Thomson range) was at all 

 events greatly upheaved in the Tertiary period, and thus an island, 

 misnamed Iceland in the ninth century, 40.450 English square miles 

 in extent, the largest island in Europe after Great Britain, rose out 

 of the Atlantic, distant only 450 miles from Cape Wrath, on the 

 northwest coast of Scotland, to Stokknes, in the southeast of Iceland. 



It is as rational to call this island Iceland as it is to call an ice 

 sheet measuring several hundred thousand square miles Greenland. 

 Iceland is not a bleak, arctic region, embedded in thick-ribbed ice, 

 though its northmost peninsula, Rifstangi, projects about a mile 

 north of the Arctic Circle. Situate between 63° 24' and 66° 33' north 

 latitude, yet its thermic anomaly is such, owing to the Gulf Stream, 

 that the mean temperature of the month of January at Stykkisholm, 

 on the west coast of Iceland, is 34.5° F. higher than it should be in 

 that latitude. It is surprising that January at Reykjavik is milder 

 by 1|° than at Milano, North Italy, or 1° F. milder than at Munich 

 on 48° 9' north latitude, i. e., 3^° farther south than London (51° 33' 

 north latitude), while the mean annual for the same place is but 1° 



Reprinted, by permission, from the Journal of Transactions of the Victoria 

 Institute, or Pliilosophical Society of Great Britain, 1902, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 1*54- 

 178; 190G, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 54-63. 



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