902 REPORT — 1881. 



southerly points which the Sagas mention as reached in Vineland ? Where was 

 Keel-ness, where Thorvald's ship ran aground, and Cross-ness, where he was buried, 

 when he died by the skraling's arrow ? Rath, in the ' Antiquitates Americanae,' 

 confidently maps out these places about the promontory of Cape Cod, in Massa- 

 chusetts, and this has been repeated since from book to book. I must plead guilty 

 to having cited Bafn's map before now, but when with reference to the present 

 meeting I consulte'd our learned editor of Scandinavian records at Oxford, Mr. 

 Gudbrand Vigfusson, and afterwards went through the original passages in ^ke 

 Sagas with Mr. York Powell, I am bound to say that the voyages of the Northmen 

 ought to be reduced to more moderate limits. It appears that they crossed from 

 Greenland to Labrador (Helluland), and thence sailing more or less south and west, 

 in two stretches of two days each they came to a place near where wild grapes grew, 

 whence they called the country Vine-land. This would, therefore, seem to have 

 been somewhere about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and it would be an interesting 

 object for a yachting cruise to try down from the east coast of Labrador a fair four 

 days' sail of a viking ship, and identify, if possible, the sound between the island 

 and the ness, the river running out of the lake into the sea, the long stretches of 

 sand, and the other local features mentioned in the Sagas. While this is in the 

 printer's hands, I hear that a paper somewhat to this same effect may come before 

 the Geographical Section, but the matter concerns us here as bearing on the southern 

 limit of the Esquimaux. The skraliw/s who came on the sea in skin canoe? 

 (kudhkeipr) , and hurled their spears with slings (valslow/va), seem by these very 

 facts to have been probably Esquimaux, and the mention of their being swarthy,. 

 with great eyes and broad cheeks, agrees tolerably with this. The statement 

 usually made that the word skrciling meant ' dwarf ' would, if correct, have settled 

 the question ; but, unfortunately, there is no real warrant for this etymology. If 

 we may take it that Esquimaux 800 years ago, before they had ever found their 

 way to Greenland, were hunting seals on the coast of Newfoundland, and cariboc 

 in the forest, their life need not have been very unlike what it is now in their Arctic 

 home. Some day, perhaps, the St. Lawrence and Newfoundland shores will be 

 searched for relics of Esquimaux life, as has been done with such success hi the 

 Aleutian Islands by Mr. W. H. Dall, though on this side of the continent we can 

 hardly expect to find, as he does, traces of long residence and rise from a still lower 

 condition. 



Surveying now the vast series of so-called native, or indigenous, tribes of North 

 and South America, we may admit that the fundamental notion on which American 

 anthropology has to be treated is its relation to Asiatic. This kind of research is, 

 as we know, quite old, but the recent advances of zoology and geology have given 

 it new breadth as well as facility. The theories which account for the wide-lying 

 American tribes, disconnected by language as they are, as all descended from 

 ancestors who came by sea in boats, or across Behring's Straits on the ice, may be 

 felt somewhat to strain the probabilities of migration, and are likely to be re- 

 modelled under the information now supplied by geology as to the distribution of 

 animals. It has become a familiar fact that the Equidse, or horse-like animals, 

 belong even more remarkably to the New than to the Old World. There was 

 plainly land-connection between America and Asia, for the horses whose remains 

 are fossil in America to have been genetically connected with the horses re-intro- 

 duced from Europe. The deer may have passed from the Old World into North 

 America in the Pliocene period ; and the opinion is strongly held that the camels 

 went the other way, originating in America and spreading thence into Asia and 

 Africa. The mammoth and the reindeer did not cross over a few thousand 

 years ago by Behring's Straits, for they had been since Pleistocene times spread 

 over the north of what was then one continent. To realise this ancient land-junction 

 of Asia and America, this ' Tertiary-bridge,' to use Professor Marsh's expression, 

 it is instructive to look at Mr. Wallace's chart of the present soundings, observ- 

 ing that an elevation of under 200 feet would make Behring's Straits land, while 

 moderately shallow sea extends southward to about the line of the Aleutian 

 Islands, below which comes the plunge into the ocean depths. If, then, we are to 

 consider America as having received its human population by ordinary migration 



