238 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OP 



(fathers) were the clerici of Dicuil. ( 3 ? 2 ) If then, as we 

 may suppose from the testimony here referred to, these 

 objects belonged to Irish monks (papar) who had come from 

 the Faroe Islands, why should they have been termed in the 

 native Sagas, " West men" (Yestmen), " who had come over 

 the sea from the westward" (kommir til vestan um haf ) ? 

 All that relates to the supposed voyage of the Gaelic chieftain 

 Madoc the son of Owen Gwyneth, is as yet veiled in pro- 

 found obscurity : the supposed race of Celto- Americans, 

 which credulous travellers thought they had discovered in 

 several parts of the United States, is gradually disappearing 

 since the introduction of strict ethnological comparison, 

 founded not on accidental resemblances of words, but on 

 organic structure and grammatical forms. ( 373 ) 



That this first discovery of America in or before the 

 eleventh century was not productive of a great and per- 

 manent enlargement of the physical contemplation of the 

 Universe, as was the re-discovery of the same continent by 

 Columbus at the close of the fifteenth century, is an almost 

 necessary consequence of the uncultivated condition of the 

 race by whom the first discovery was made, and of the nature 

 of the regions to which it remained limited. The Scandi- 

 navians were not prepared by any scientific knowledge to 

 explore the lands in which they settled farther than appeared 

 necessary for the supply of their most immediate wants. 

 Greenland and Iceland, which must be regarded as the true 

 niother countries of those new colonies, are regions in which 

 man has to cope with all the difficulties and hardships of an 

 inhospitable climate. The wonderfully organised Icelandic 

 Free State did, indeed, preserve its independence for three 

 centuries and a half, until the destruction of civil freedom, 



