nything that has
gone before it. On reading it carefully through, it seems to me
the best book we have on the subject in English, or perhaps in
any language.

Since the above was written, the news has come of the sudden
and dreadful death of Mr. Reeves, in the railroad disaster at
Hagerstown, Indiana, February 25, 1891. Mr. Reeves was an
American scholar of most brilliant promise, only in his
thirty-fifth year.]

[Footnote 178: Rink, _Danish Greenland_, p. 6.]

[Footnote 179: We thus see the treacherousness of one of the
arguments cited by the illustrious Arago to prove that the
Greenland coast must be colder now than in the tenth century.
The Icelanders, he thinks, called it "a green land" because of
its verdure, and therefore it must have been warmer than at
present. But the land which Eric called green was evidently
nothing more than the region about Julianeshaab, which still
has plenty of verdure; and so the argument falls to the ground.
See Arago, _Sur l'etat thermometrique du globe terrestre_, in
his _Oeuvres_, tom. v. p. 243. There are reasons, however, for
believing that Greenland was warmer in the tenth century than
at present. See below, p. 176.]

[Footnote 180: The map is reduced from Rafn's _Antiquitates
Americanae_, tab. xv. The ruins dotted here and there upon it
have been known ever since the last rediscovery of Greenland in
1721, but until after 1831 they were generally supposed to be
the ruins of the West Bygd. After the fifteenth century, when
the old colony had perished, and its existence had become a
mere literary tradition, there grew up a notion that the names
East Bygd and West Bygd indicated that the two settlements must
have been respectively eastward and westward of Cape Farewell;
and after 1721 much time was wasted in looking for vestiges of
human habitations on the barren and ice-bound eastern coast. At
length, in 1828-31, the exploring expedition sent out by the
Danish government, under the very able and intelligent Captain
Graah, demonstrated that both settlements were west of Cape
Farewell, and that the ruins here indicated upon the map are
the ruins of the E