254 REV, F. A. WALKER, BOTANY, ETC., OF ICELAND. 
every year, where they find plenty of their own country- 
men comfortably settled. The population of Iceland, which 
had increased gradually up to 76,000, does not now number more 
than 72,000. Another speaker alluded to the fact of Iceland pre- 
senting remnants of what Greenland is at the present time. 
Well, the fact is that early in the fourteenth century there was a 
period of storms everywhere; Greenland was rendered more arctic, 
even than formerly, by the violent snow storms, and the west coast 
of Iceland—the nearest part of that island to Greenland—received 
a shock of a wonderful character from which it has never thoroughly 
recovered; because, prior to that date, in feudal times, we know 
wild apples were found in Iceland. The name Reyda, which 
signifies the wild crab,* sufficiently indicates this; it is retained 
in several places. As to Strokkr, in the summer of 1888 it was in 
full activity. 1 do not know whether it has been generally ob- 
served to be the fact, but I noticed the very deep pools at Thing- 
vellir are surrounded, as I took it, by cliffs of prehistoric lava; 
at least, the tradition is that the lava at Thingvellir and Reykja- 
yik is prehistoric. But these pools at Thingvellir, though the 
colours far within are just the same as at Blesi, have icy-cold 
waters—icy-cold where once there was a great volcanic outburst 
and eruption, as is the characteristic of all those springs that once 
were in a proportional state of boiling heat when forces, now 
long extinct, were in full play. About the deep fjords on the 
north and west sides, that is so. Breidifjordr, on the west, and 
Hunafjord, on the north, come so near to each other that they 
nearly cut off the north-west peninsula and make it an island. But 
the southern part of the island, where some of the glaciers are 
said to be even now approaching the sea, is much less indented 
than the north and west, and to some extent even than the east. 
The meeting was then adjourned. 
* Captain Burton’s work on Ultima Thule is my authority for the 
etymology of Reyda. I have, however, met with those who assign 
another meaning to the word.—I have since revisited Iceland (June 7 to 
July 18, 1890), and been twice round the island in the steamer “ Laura,” 
and made fresh collections of its flora and insect fauna, and acquired a 
good deal of miscellaneous information, and was present at the celebration 
of the one thousandth anniversary of the colonisation of the Eyjafjordr 
by Helg Magri (Helgi the Lean or Meagre), from Norway, in A.D. 890.— 
By AW, 
