DESCRiniox or Greenland. 207 



ground, which may become heated and ignited by its own 

 movement, the rapidity of which may resemble that of those 

 long rockets or tongues of fire, which fall through or across 

 the air, or of the lights which flutter about churchyards. I was 

 assured that this northern light was seen distinctly from Ice- 

 land and Norway, when the sky was calm and the night was 

 not troubled with any clouds. It not only lights the peo- 

 ple of the Arctic World, it even extends as far as our 

 own climates. And this light is doubtless the same that 

 our well-known friend, the learned and judicious philo- 

 sopher Monsieur Gassendy, told me he had observed several 

 times, and to which he gave the name of Aurora Borealis. 

 The most remarkable he had ever seen was that which ap- 

 peared to all France, silent e lund (for it was only one day old), 

 during the night of the twelfth and thirteenth of September 

 1621. He has given a summary of it in the life of M. Peresc, 

 but it is fully and Avonderfully well described in the learned 

 observations made by him at the close of his Exercitation 

 against Dr. Flud. To this I must refer you, not wishing to 

 engage myself still more deeply in this subject, but to take 

 up the thread again of my history of Greenland. 



The Danish Chronicle states, that in the year 1271, a 

 strong wind from the north-west carried to Iceland so large 

 a quantity of ice, laden with such a number of bears and so 

 much wood, that they thought what they had discovered at the 

 west of Greenland was not the whole of Greenland, and that 

 this land extended farther north-west. This induced some 

 Icelandic sailors to attempt this discovery : they found, how- 

 ever, nothing but ice. The kings of Norway and Denmark 

 had for a long time entertained the same idea and the same 

 design, and had sent there many vessels, and even had gone 

 themselves, but without any better success than the Icelandic 

 sailors. Probably the sailors were induced to make the trial, 

 cither from report, or from the opinion received and founded 

 on some report that there were in that country several mines 



