142 AMERICAN LITERARY FORGERIES. 



we follow their example it is only right to peruse the learned discoverer's 

 peroration. " No longer is the Huitramannaland a visionary Atlantis. 

 No longer is the discovery of America by the Irish, in the dim distance 

 of the panorama of history, pointed to as if by the spectre of a dream. 

 Syasy, the fairhaired, as if gifted with the life of a Methuselah, has risen 

 from her sleep of eight centuries, and traced on a rock, with an unerring 

 finger, the distinct outlines of the fact, and confirmed her wonderful 

 story with her ashes :" — for we ought to have mentioned sooner that two 

 molar teeth were dug up, along with some bronze trinkets, and two 

 Roman or Byzantine coins. 



This " Extraordinary discovery on the Potomac " went the round of 

 the American papers ; with what amount of credit it would be hard to 

 say. But no scientific or literary journal of note troubled itself with 

 enquiries after the learned Dane ; nor is it likely that any orders were 

 sent home for Sir Thomas Murray's English translation of the Skalholt 

 Saga, though such a book would seem a very fitting addition to Ameri- 

 can libraries* The story lived out its nine days' life, as another curi- 

 ous illustration of our young Western World passing through a phase 

 analogous to that of England's eighteenth century fit of spurious 

 antiques and literary forgeries, and so seemed on the high road to 

 oblivion : when, lo ! it makes its debut, as a genuine contribution to 

 science, in the pages of an English scientific periodical. 



The article is one of the curiosities of literature. In the Washing- 

 ton Union the masquerading is overdone, and provokes a smile at last 

 by its extravagance. But in the London Anthropological Review for 

 April, 1868, ic reappears tricked out in so becoming a style that it 

 probably failed at first sight to startle the intelligent reader, notwith- 

 standing the novelty of the idea suggested by its title : " Icelandic 

 Eemains on the Potomac, near Washington." It is worth studying as 

 a specimen of what choice terms can do even for a somewhat meagre 

 fancy. The original American version runs very much in the old 

 fashioned style of antiquarian news. But in the scientific resum^ we 

 read : " A very important contribution to the archaic anthropology of 

 the American continent, interesting to the historian of the early migra- 

 tion of races, has just been made by Professor Thomas C. Raffinnson, 

 of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries of Copenhagen, in the 

 immediate vicinity of Washington, establishing beyond all doubt the 

 early settlement of that district by inhabitants of Iceland, and confirm- 

 ing, in a signal manner, several statements made in the Skalholt Saga 



