ICELANDIC NOTES. 415 



ing in depth from 10 feet to 600 feet in the sunken river 

 beds. There was much discussion about the remarkable 

 after-glow in 1884 which followed the volcanic eruption in 

 the Straits of Sunda. The same phenomenon followed that 

 of the Skapta Jokull, was speculated upon by Benjamin 

 Franklin, and alluded to by Cowjier in the second book of 

 The Task. Hekia, the best known of the Icelandic volcanoes, 

 is also the most active, having broken out about 25 times 

 in the course of one thousand years. It is insignificant 

 in appearance ; a long sloping three-coned ridge of sand and 

 slag, rising abruptly from a plain covered with sand and 

 pumice, once fertile and inhabited. I ascended it three years 

 after the eruption in 1878. The lava of 1841, the preceding 

 eruption, was easily distinguishable by its glossy blackness 

 and knobby vitrification. There is no crater like that of 

 Vesuvius on the summit, which is almost flat. From it, on 

 three sides, spread the lava of 1878 far towards the horizon, 

 belching out still in many places intermittent volumes of 

 smoke. It is needless to speak of the Geysirs, an exhibition 

 of heat force often described, and of which we have the like 

 in New Zealand. 



I do not like to conclude even these brief notes without 

 mentioning the high claims of the Icelander to the goodwill 

 of geographers. A few Norwegian nobles with their Irish 

 serfs, taking refuge in Iceland from the first King of Norway, 

 became prominent in Europe from the ninth to the twelfth 

 century as writers and poets, and not less as soldiers and 

 merchants. They were also the great discoverers and 

 colonisers of tiieir age. The history of their Greenland 

 colony, founded early in the eleventh century, is as sad as it 

 is singular. It flourished for four hundred years, the last of 

 seventeen bishops having been appointed in 1408 ; but com- 

 munication with Iceland stopped in 1418, and when, in 1578, 

 Frederick II. of Denmark sent an expedition to Greenland, 

 every trace of the colony had disappeared. The Icelanders 

 also discovered America, and in the Sagas accounts are given 

 of voyages to White Man's Land, identified with Georgia 

 and Florida ; HeUuland or Slate Country, probably New- 

 foundland ; Markland, or Forest Country, thought to be 

 Nova Scotia or Labrador ; and New England, which the Ice- 

 landers called Vinland. In New England a colony was 

 founded in 1007 consisting of 151 men and 7 women, and 

 with it communication was kept up until the fourteenth 

 century. In 1121 Pope Pascal II. consecrated an Icelandic 



