210 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
miles are likely to be the most trying; the coast region is cut up by gaping crev- 
ices and broad rivers in the midst of rugged hills of ice, and these will necessitate 
long detours. The rivers, as a rule, terminate in magnificent waterfalls, which 
plunge suddenly into what seem to be bottomless abysses of ice. In his former 
journey Nordenskjold attained a height of about 2,000 feet, and east and north 
the country seemed to rise gradually, and presented the appearance of a billowy 
sea suddenly frozen. Auleitsivik Fjord, from which the expedition will start on 
its journeys, opens just below Disco Island, and penetrates a considerable distance 
into the land. At this point Greenland is about its broadest, so that the line of 
exploration has been well chosen to test the theory which has prompted the expe- 
dition. This theory was no new one on the part of Nordenskjold, for as long ago 
as his former expedition in 1870 he seems to have come to the conclusion that 
Heber's "icy mountains" were confined to the regions of the Greenland coast, 
surrounding a land comparatively free from ice, and even wooden in its southern 
parts. If Nordenskjold succeeds in confirming his hypothesis it will be one of 
the triumphs of science. 
It will be after the return from this inland journey, probably in the early 
part of September, that the expedition will make an attempt to land on the south- 
east coast to search for remains of the old Norse colonies founded here 900 years 
ago. While the Danes were harrying the coasts of Saxon England, eighty years 
before William the Norman landed at Pevensey, Red Erik, outlawed in Iceland, 
set out to seek the land which Gunbjorn had seen far to the westward 100 years 
earlier. This land he found, and made it his home, and colonized it with his 
kinsmen and friends, who reared their villages and farm-houses and churches over 
a great stretch of the southwest coast. At their most flourishing period these old 
Norse colonies probably numbered 10,000 inhabitants. Even in Red Erik's time 
adventurous spirits sailed still further west, and planted outlying settlements on 
the shores of Vinland, Helluland and Markland; the first Europeans probably 
who set foot on a land on which centuries later their kinsmen were to rear one of 
the greatest nations on the face of the earth. For the old Norse Vinland was in 
all probability the modern Massachusetts, while Markland and Helluland have 
been identified with Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and perhaps Labrador. It 
seems strange that spirits so enterprising and adventurous, the countrymen of 
the Vikings who kept Europe in terror, from the Orkneys to the Mediterranean, 
who mastered England, and ultimately gave her a dynasty and an aristocracy, 
should have let these momentous discoveries pass into oblivion, should have 
finally turned their backs upon a land of unbounded promise and settled down in 
contentment on the ice-bound shores of Greenland. The truth is that the Norse- 
men at home never seem to have realized the vast importance of the discoveries 
of their venturesome kinsmen, and although, as we have said, the population 
increased to 10,000, the communication with Iceland and Norway soon became 
fitful, and after the fourteenth century we hear little of them. 
We have, however, a brief written in 1448 by the Pope to the Bishop of 
Norway, treating of the pitiful condition of the inhabitants of Greenland, who. 
