608 COSMOS. 



inhabitants of the island are called " west men, who had come 

 across the sea" (emigrants settled in Papyli on the south-east 

 coast, and on the neighbouring small island of Papar), Ice- 

 land was not at first peopled directly from Europe but from 

 Virginia and Carolina, (Great Ireland, the American White 

 Men's Land,) by Irishmen, who had earlier emigrated to 

 America. The important work, de Mensura Orbis Terrce, 

 composed by the Irish monk Dicuil about the year 825, and, 

 therefore, thirty-eight years before the Northmen acquired 

 their knowledge of Iceland from Naddod, does not, however, 

 confirm this opinion. 



Christian anchorites in the north of Europe, and pious 

 Buddhist monks in the interior of Asia, explored and opened 

 to civilisation regions that had previously been inaccessible. 

 The eager striving to diffuse religious opinions has sometimes 

 paved the way for warlike expeditions, and sometimes for the 

 introduction of peaceful ideas, and the establishment of rela- 

 tions of commerce. Religious zeal, which so strongly charac- 

 t^rises the doctrines promulgated in the systems of India, 

 Palestine, and Arabia, and which is so widely opposed to the 

 indifference of the ancient polytheistic Greeks and Romans, 

 was the means of furthering the advance of geographical know- 

 ledge in the earlier portions of the middle ages. Letronne, 

 the commentator on Dicuil, has shown much ingenuity in his 

 attempts to prove that after the Irish missionaries had been 

 driven from the Faroe Islands by the Northmen, they began, 

 about the year 795, to visit Iceland. The Northmen, when 

 they first reached Iceland, found Irish books, mass bells, and 

 other objects, which had been left by the earlier settlers, called 

 Papar. These Papce, fathers, are the Clerici of Dicuil.* If, 

 as his testimony would lead us to conclude, these objects had 

 belonged to Irish monks, who had come from the Faroe Islands, 

 the question naturally arises, why these monks (Papar} should 

 be termed in the native sagas Westmen (Vestmenn), who had 

 " come from the west across the sea? (Kommir til vestan um 

 ha/.)" The deepest obscurity still shrouds everything con- 

 nected with the voyage of the Gaelic chief, Madoc, son of Owen 

 Guineth, to a great western land in the year 1170, and the 



* Letronne, Reclierches geogr. et crit. sur le Lime, " de Mensura 

 Orbis Terra" compose" en Irlandc, par Dicuil, 1814, pp. 129-146. 

 Compare iny Examen crit. de I' Hist, de Iff. Geogr., t. ii. pp. 87-91. 



