ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.* 

 The Rev. Canon Girdlestone, M.A., in the Chair. 



The Minutes of the last Meeting were read and confirmed, and the 

 follov/ing paper, illustrated by maps and lantern slides, was read by the 

 author : — 



ICELAND: ITS HISTORY AND INHABITANTS. 

 By Herr JoN Stefansson, Ph.D. 



/GEOGRAPHICALLY and geologically Iceland is part of, 

 VjT a continuation of, the British Isles, for it is situated on 

 the same submarine mountain ridge, stretching from south- 

 east to north-west across the North Atlantic, the average 

 depth on it being 1,500 feet to 2,000 feet, while north and 

 south of it 12,000 feet is the average depth reached by 

 sounding. According to Prof. James Geikie, land connection 

 between Greenland and the British Isles must have existed 

 in Cainozoic times, for relics of the same Tertiary flora are 

 found in Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland. The 

 deposits in which this fossil flora occurs are associated with 

 great sheets of volcanic rocks. This so-called Iceland ridge 

 (or Wyville Thomson range) was at all events greatly 

 upheaved in the Tertiary period, and thus an island, misnamed 

 Iceland in the ninth century, 40,450 English square miles 

 in extent, the largest island in Europe after Great Britain, 

 rose out of the Atlantic, distant only 450 miles from Cape 

 Wrath, on the north-west coast of Scotland, to Stokknes, in 

 the south-east of Iceland. 



It is as rational to call this island Iceland as it is to call an 



* Monday, April 21st, 1902. 



