238 COSMOS. 



bus, in a work " On the five habitable zones of the earth," 

 which has now become extremely rare, says that in the month 

 of February, 1477, he visited Iceland, "where the sea was 

 not at that time covered with ice, and which had been resort- 

 ed to by many traders from Bristol."* If he had there heard 

 tidings of the earlier colonization of an extended and contin- 

 uous tract of land, situated on the opposite coast, Helluland 

 it mi/da, Markland, and the good Vinland, and if he connect- 

 ed this knowledge of a neighboring continent with those proj- 

 ects which had already engaged his attention since 1470 and 

 1473, his voyage to Thule (Iceland) would have been made 

 so much the more a subject of consideration during the cele- 

 brated lawsuit regarding the merit of an earlier discovery, 

 which did not end till 1517, since the suspicious fiscal officer 

 mentions a map of the world (mappa mundo) which had been 

 seen at Rome by Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and on which the 

 New Continent was supposed to be marked. If Columbus 

 had desired to seek a continent of which he had obtained in- 

 formation in Iceland, he would assuredly not have directed 

 his course southwest from the Canary Islands. Commercial 

 relations were maintained between Bergen and Greenland un- 

 til 1484, and, therefore, until seven years after Columbus's 

 voyage to Iceland. 



Wholly different from the first discovery of the New Con- 

 tinent in the eleventh century, its rediscovery by Christopher 

 Columbus and his explorations of the tropical regions of Amer- 

 ica have been attended by events of cosmical importance, and 

 by a marked influence on the extension of physical views. 

 Although the mariners who conducted this great expedition 

 at the end of the fifteenth century were not actuated by the 



* While this circumstance of the absence of ice in February, 1477, 

 has been brought forward as a proof that Columbus's Island of Thule 

 could not be Iceland, Finn Magnuseu found in ancient historical sources 

 that until March, 1477, there was no snow in the northern part of Ice- 

 land, and that in February of the same year the southern coast was 

 free from ice. Examen Crit., t. i., p. 105 ; t. v., p. 213. It is very re 

 markable, that Columbus, in the same " Tralado de las cinco zonas hab- 

 itables," mentions a more southern island, Frislanda ; a name which 

 is not in the maps of Andrea Bianco (1436), or in that of Fra Mauro 

 (1457-1470), but which plays a great part in the travels, mostly re- 

 garded as fabulous, of the brothers Zeni (1388-1404). (Compare 'Exa- 

 men Crit., t. ii., p. 114-126.) Columbus can not have been acquainted 

 with the travels of the Fratelli Zeni, as they even remained unknown 

 to the Venetian family until the year 1558, in which Marcolini first 

 published them, fifty-two years after the death of the great admiral. 

 Wheu came the admiral's acquaintance with the name Frislanda 1 



