A7ig. 13, 1874] 



NA TURE 



281 



remained three years, at the end of which time he re- 

 moved to the site of the present capital, Reikjavik 

 (" Reeky Bay "), where superstition apparently deter- 

 mined him to remain, notwithstanding the remonstrances 

 of his servants, wlio had seen many more inviting spots 

 along the coast. Meantime Lcif, or Thorleif as he was 

 now called, from a big sword he brought back with him 

 from Ireland, had built his house'at Thorleifshofde, where, 

 in the first spring after his arrival, he began to cultivate 

 the ground. Having only one ox, however, the story 

 goes, he compelled his Irish slaves to draw the plough ; 

 they thereon rebelled and murdered their master, they 

 themselves being in turn pursued and nearly all killed by 

 Ingolf, who then appropriated all the country between 

 the river Olousa and Hval Fjord. The oppressions of 

 Harold the Fair-haired soon sent many of the best of 

 Norway's sons to become settlers in the new colony, and 

 thus it was that Iceland was peopled, not by the scum of 

 the mother country, as is too often the case, but by the 

 best blood of old Norway. This influx of colonists con- 

 tinued for sixty years, when, the causes of emigration from 

 Norway having ceased, and the best ground in Iceland 

 having been fully occupied, immigration gradually came 

 to an end. 



From the first the colonists seem to have set themselves 

 to make the best of their not very promising surroundings, 

 and ere long to have settled down into a compara- 

 tively peaceful and contented community. One Ulflect is 

 said to have compiled a code of laws, and instituted the 

 " Althing," or National Assembly, in 928, when for the first 

 time it met at Thingvalla. Among other enactinents pau- 

 perism was suppressed as a crime by the severest laws, one 

 of which was intended effectually to prevent the procrea- 

 tion of a pauper class in a country where it was only by 

 dint of the hardest labour that the sea and the land could 

 be made to yield enough for all. The colonists were con- 

 verted to Christianity about the year 1,000 ; in 1261, after 

 many internal contests, the whole island swore allegiance 

 to the Norwegian king, but about 1387 it was transferred 

 to Denmark, attached to which kingdom it has ever since 

 remained. The King of Denmark is now on the island 

 — an event of the rarest occurrence — and, as we have said, 

 is to grant to his Icelandic subjects a new and liberal 

 constitution ; w-e believe he is accompanied by Prof. 

 Steenstrup. 



This, deprived of detail and of much that is doubtful 

 — though the Icelanders have less of the legendary 

 in their early history than most other old countries— is the 

 story of the colonisation of Iceland a thousand years ago. 

 We have not space to enter into further detail con- 

 cerning the physical aspect of the island, the character 

 and customs of the people, their wonderful literature in all 

 departments of intellectual activity, their discovery of 

 and long intercourse with Greenland and North America. 

 Greenland was seen by an Icelander, Gunnbjorn, so 

 early as 877, and for centuries after some rocks between 

 Iceland and Greenland were known as " Gunnbjorn's 

 Skerries." Erik Rauda (" the Red ") first visited Green- 

 land in 9S3 ; three years afterwards he planted a colony 

 on the south-west coast. We understand that a depu- 

 tation from America is attending the millenary fetes 

 now being held in Iceland, and that some of the 

 American scientific societies have shown their good- 



will by sending valuable presents of books, &c. This 

 is right and becoming on the part of the Ameri- 

 cans, for, as we have just indicated, the Icelanders 

 were the first European colonists of America, and had 

 regular intercourse with the western continent for about 

 300 years ; and it is curious to conjecture what might have 

 been the history of that continent had the Norse attempts 

 at colonisation not proved abortive. It is by no means im- 

 probable that Columbus himself, when he made that 

 northern voyage in 1467, "a hundred leagues beyond 

 Thule," may have heard some fragmentary traditions of 

 the Greenland colony which he may have treasured in 

 his heart as a confirmation of the idea which was sub- 

 sequently to bear so rich fruit. 



The history ofthis old Norse colony proves that the people 

 have great capacity for work, and we again hope that this 

 celebration of the courage and dauntless energy of their 

 forefathers will be the means of rousing them to renewed 

 activity, which will be beneficial both to themselves and 

 to the world at large, which has increasing need of all the 

 really good working power it can command. 



RECENT RESEARCHES IN PHOTOGRAPHY 



A SUBSTANTIAL contribution has been recently 

 made to our knowledge of the action of light upon 

 silver salts — a contribution which we cannot but consider 

 as of the highest importance to photography, both as a 

 science and as an art. 



In the autumn of last year Dr. Herman Vogel an- 

 nounced * as the result of some experiments that he had 

 been making, that "we are in a position to render bromide 

 of silver sensitive for any colour ive choose — that is to say, 

 to heighten for particular colours the sensibility it was 

 originally endowed with." This discovery is such a 

 decided advance that it will be interesting to trace it from 

 the beginning. Dr. Vogel, in the first instance, found to 

 his astonishment that some dry bromide plates prepared 

 by Col. Stuart Wortleyin this country were more sensitive 

 to the green than to the blue portions of the spectrum. 

 This result was so totally opposed to the generally received 

 notions that the subject was submitted to further exami- 

 nation. In the next experiments a comparison was insti- 

 tuted between dry bromide plates and the same plates 

 when wet from the bath solution of silver nitrate. The 

 results showed a decided difference in the behaviour of 

 the plates. The sensibility of dry bromide plates appears 

 to extend to a greater extent into the least refrangible end 

 of the spectrum than is the case with wet. plates. In Dr. 

 Vogel's plates, in fact, which received the spectrum formed 

 by the battery of prisms of a direct vision spectroscope 

 from a ray of sunlight reflected from a heliostat and 

 passing through a slit 0*25 mm. wide, the photographic 

 impression of the spectrum, when developed by an acid 

 developer, extended in the case of the dry plates into the 

 orange, but with wet plates not quite into the yellow. 

 The bromide plates prepared by Vogel, moreover, did not 

 exhibit that increased sensitiveness for the green rays 

 which characterised Col. Stuart Wortley's plates, and this 

 led the German investigator to conjecture that the latter 

 plates contained some substance which absorbed the 

 green to a greater extent than the blue. To test this 



* Poggendotjf's AnnaUfit vol. cl., p. 453. 



