248 DESCRIPTION OF GREENLAND. 



not knowing where to limit tliis sea, we shall not be able to 

 judge if Greenland is part of the continent of America or not. 

 The probability is as I have already told you, that it is not, 

 since Cajitain Munck thought there was a passage in this sea 

 to the east, and to which he persuaded a number of persons 

 of quality in Denmark, who had formed a company, to try 

 and verify it. 



I discover at the same time the errors of the person 

 who has written dissertations upon the origin of the people 

 of America, whom he makes out to have come from Green- 

 land,^ and makes the first inhabitants of Greenland to 

 have come from Norway. He proposed to make us believe this 

 by a certain affinity which he points out between some Ame- 

 rican words which terminate in Ian, and the land of the 

 Germans, Lombards, and the Norwegians ; and by the con- 

 nection of manners, which, he says, there is between the 

 Americans and Norwegians, whom he takes for the Germans 

 of Tacitus. 



You will judge, sir, by the continuance and the reason- 

 ing of my history, that this author errs in every way. First, 

 inasmuch as the Norwegians were not the first inhabitants 

 of Greenland, as it appears from his narrations and the 

 demonstrations I have given you of them ; and inasmuch 

 as that M. Vormius, who is very learned in the antiquities 

 of the north, so far from connecting the origin of the people 

 of America with the people of Greenland, thinks that the 

 Skrcglingres, the original inhabitants of Vestrebug in Green- 

 land, came from America. Secondly, he is mistaken, inas- 

 much as there is little or no probability that Greenland was 

 part of the continent of America, and that the passage from 

 the one to the other was not so well known nor so possible 

 as is imagined. Thirdly, he is mistaken in that which I 

 have shown you, that there is no affinity of language or man- 



' Georgii Ilornii de Originibus Americanis Libri quatuor. Vide 

 Lib. iii, cap. 6, G, and 8. 



