239 
fire the imaji;iiiation of the layniaii, but they all lack solid geological 
foundation, and arc really not needed to explain the many problems 
created by human migrations.^ 
It is clear, then, that apart from the possible land-bridge at 
Bering strait, man can have reached America only by water across 
the Pacific or the Atlantic ocean. Have we any reason to suppose 
that there was a migration across the Atlantic before the voyages 
of the Scandinavian Vikings about the year 1000 A.I>. and their 
successors from southern Europe in the fifteenth century? Professor 
Wiener claims that the negroes of West Africa made numerous 
voyages to America in the centuries before Columbus, introducing 
not only tobacco, maize, and other plants, but the foundations of 
the Mayan calendar and religion.- Certainly the Atlantic is much 
narrower between West Africa and Brazil than at any other place, 
and both the equatorial currents and the wdnds favour a passage 
there from the Old World to the New. Nevertheless, the pre- 
Columbian aborigines showed not the slightest trace of negro or 
European admixture, and no well-informed ethnologist will accept the 
African origin of maize or tobacco, still less of the Mayan calendar. 
It seems quite certain, indeed, that America was entirely unin- 
fluenced by either Europe or Africa until the fifteenth century, for 
even the three-year sojourn of the Vikings somewhere on the nortli- 
east coast produced no permanent effect on the Indian tribes inhabit- 
ing that area. Only in one region did pre-Columbian Europeans 
leave some slight trace — in southwestern Greenland, the home of an 
Icelandic colony from 990 A.D. until the sixteenth century. There 
Mathiassen has unearthed a few Icelandic relics in the old Eskimo 
settlement of Inugsuk,-^ and certain authorities derive two or three 
words in the local Eskimo dialect from old Norse. Yet this very 
exception is peculiarly instructive, because it shows that unless the 
conditions are favourable to receptivity, the influence of one culture 
on another, even after generations of contact, may be almost negli- 
gible. The Icelanders were more advanced in many ways than their 
neighbours, yet they produced little effect on the material culture of 
the Eskimo, or on their social and religious life. 
1 I am iiHk'ljlfd to Mr. W. A. .lolmston, of tlio Oi'olorriciil Suivoy, Ottawa, for a.ssistance m these 
geolopieal matters. 
2 Wiener, Leo: “ .Afriea and tlie Disccivery of Arneru'a” ; 3 voLs. (Pliiladelphia, 1919). 
3 Mathiasseti, 'I’.: Iniigsuk, A Meditietal E.skiiiio Settlement in Upernivnk District, West Green- 
land'’; Meddelelscr orn Grpniand, vol. Ixxvii (Copenhagen, 1930). 
