240 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OP 



foreigners, and even with Iceland. In a now very rare work 

 of Columbus " on the Five Habitable Zones of the Earth/* 

 he mentions having visited Iceland in the month of February 

 1477, and adds that "the sea was not then covered with 

 ice, ( 374 ) and that the country was visited by many traders 

 from Bristol/' If he had heard there of the former coloni- 

 sation on an opposite coast of an extensive connected terri- 

 tory of Helluland it mikla, of Markland, and of " the good 

 Yinland" and had connected this knowledge of a neigh- 

 bouring continent with the projects with which he had 

 already been occupied since 1470 and 1473, his visit to 

 Thule (Iceland) would no doubt have been more spoken of 

 in the celebrated lawsuit respecting the merit of the first 

 discovery, which was not concluded until 1517 ; for the 

 suspicious Fiscal even mentions a chart (mappa mundo) 

 which Martin Alonso Pinzon had seen at Borne, on which 

 the New Continent was said to have been laid down. If 

 Columbus had designed to seek for a land of which he had 

 obtained information in Iceland, he would certainly not 

 have steered a south-westerly course from the Canaries in 

 his first voyage of discovery. Between Bergen and Green- 

 land, however, commercial relations still subsisted in 1484, 

 seven years after Columbus's voyage to Iceland. 



Very different from the first discovery of the new con- 

 tinent in the eleventh century, in its results on the history 

 of the world, and in its influence on the enlargement 

 of the physical contemplation of the Umverse, was the 

 re--discovery of America, the discovery of its tropical 

 lands, by Columbus. Although in conducting his great 

 enterprise he had by no means in view the discovery of a 

 new part of the world; although it is even certain that 



