s, according
to Stephanus of Byzantium. Cf. Aristophanes, _Aves_, 1553;
Julius Solinus, _Polyhistor_, ed. Salmasius, cap. 240. Just as
these sheets are going to press there comes to me Mr. Perry's
acute and learned _History of Greek Literature_, New York,
1890, in which this subject is mentioned in connection with the
mendacious and medical Ktesias:--These stories have probably
acquired a literary currency "by exercise of the habit, not
unknown even to students of science, of indiscriminate copying
from one's predecessors, so that in reading Mandeville we have
the ghosts of the lies of Ktesias, almost sanctified by the
authority of Pliny, who quoted them and thereby made them a
part of mediaeval folk-lore--and from folk-lore, probably, they
took their remote start" (p. 522).]

[Footnote 219: "En that var gravara ok safvali ok allskonar
skinnavara" (Rafn, p. 59),--i. e. gray fur and sable and all
sorts of skinwares; in another account, "skinnavoeru ok algra
skinn," which in the Danish version is "skindvarer og aegte
graaskind" (id. p. 150),--i. e. skinwares and genuine gray
furs. Cartier in Canada and the Puritans in Massachusetts were
not long in finding that the natives had good furs to sell.]

[Footnote 220: Rafn, p. 156.]

[Footnote 221: Much curious information respecting the use of
elephants in war may be found in the learned work of the
Chevalier Armandi, _Histoire militaire des elephants_, Paris,
1843. As regards Thorfinn's bull, Mr. Laing makes the kind of
blunder that our British cousins are sometimes known to make
when they get the Rocky Mountains within sight of Bunker Hill
monument. "A continental people in that part of America," says
Mr. Laing, "could not be strangers to the much more formidable
bison." _Heimskringla_, p. 169. Bisons on the Atlantic coast,
Mr. Laing?! And then his comparison quite misses the point; a
bison, if the natives had been familiar with him, would not
have been at all formidable as compared to the bull which they
had never before seen. A horse is much less formidable than a
cougar, but Aztec warriors who did not mind a cougar were
paralyzed with terror at the sig