94 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



and the reference to &quot; Africa,&quot; my own probable limit for him would 

 be more southerly even than Norfolk, though it is all conjecture. 

 Juul Dieserud was perhaps the first writer to point out the probability 

 that Leif had gone farther south than Thorfinn, though Moulton s 

 History of New York had carried Thorvald to Manhattan or beyond 

 it. The account of the shore westward beyond Leif s-booths in the 

 Thorvald section of the Flateybook saga undoubtedly suggests the 

 outer face of Long Island, N. Y., or some like low strand possibly 

 a reminiscence of Leif s earlier cursory visit to the coast. 



Of course we must not forget that the range of a plant may change 

 with time, a lowering or rising of the average temperature being 

 an important factor in determining this. Indeed, in the case of the 

 squirrel-grape a withdrawal from Nova Scotia seems to have really 

 occurred within a hundred years. But the disappearance may be 

 due to their sparseness and to human interference in clearing ground, 

 rather than to a very few feet of crustal uplift or other change in 

 conditions. During the previous 800 years, man would not be a 

 factor, for the Indians of the region were not agricultural nor likely 

 to work, except in fishing and hunting, beyond the absolute needs 

 of their canoes and camp-fires. The seasons, too, during the last 

 300 years appear pretty constant in quality, except where modified a 

 little by shearing off the forests. The few weather hints of the 

 earlier Norse sagas tell the same story of relative temperature north 

 and south, although the upper border of the grape-belt may have 

 receded a little. 



One might fancy that the increasing severity in Greenland s 

 climate, which Ivar Bardsen noted about midway between our time 

 and that of Eric the Red (though Dr. Nansen doubts it) , would neces 

 sarily be repeated along our coast from Labrador to Cape Ann, by 

 reason of the augmented volume and coldness of the southward- 

 running Arctic current. But the problem is not so simple, for a mild 

 Greenland season has been found to make a chill one in Labrador, 

 as Dr. Fiske 1 has noted, by loosening a greater mass of ice from its 

 moorings to float southward. On the whole, we may more safely 

 assume approximately the same climate as at present and the same 

 area of abundance for fox-grapes in the year 1000 until we have some 

 proof of change. 



The &quot;wild wheat &quot; of the saga will be dealt with more fully in 

 a later chapter. If construed as &quot;strand oats,&quot; for example by 

 Prof. Fernald, it clearly contradicts the statements about grapes 



1 The Discovery of America. 



