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 SHRINKAGE OF NAME 99 fusing it with Greenland, which they well knew and which Zaltieri distinctly shows as Grutlandia. They would be far from admit- ting a common origin. Perhaps in most of such northern cases a conception like Coppo's of Greenland as an oceanic island is at the root of the derivation ; but successive copyings, modifications, and shiftings may have altered the area, form, and location, while the clue was gradually lost and only the name remained hardly as a reminder, for it is of too general descriptive application. VARIOUS "GREEN ISLANDS:" SHRINKAGE OF THE NAME There is, indeed, one instance of a Green Island with which Greenland can have had nothing whatever to do. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera's sketch map of 151 1 8 shows a small tropical Isla Verde near Trinidad; it is apparently Tobago. Doubtless its luxuriance of vegetation prompted the name. This may have happened in other instances of warm climates or even in temperate zones where grass and foliage grow freely; so that we in many cases cannot distinguish on the maps the Green Islands, real or fanciful, which acquired their name as a remote legacy of Eric's land from those which were called "green" simply because they were green. Both derivations may some- times apply; but the islands of the far northwest bearing that name, like Coppo's island and the Catalan's Ilia Verde, must naturally go into the former category. As we have seen, Green Islands were scattered rather widely; but the name occurs most often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the middle or eastern part of the ocean to indicate a small island, having Mayda (Vlaenderen) for its rather distant consort. Desceliers indeed, in I546 9 (Fig. 9), shows it in the same longitude as the tip of Labrador, but this is done by carrying Labrador too far eastward. St. Brandan's Island is a neighbor on his map. Ortelius, in isyo 10 (Fig. 10) and Mercator, in 1587," 8 A. E. Nordenskiold: Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography, transl. by J. A. Ekelof and C. R. Markham, Stockholm, 1889, p. 67. 9 Kretschmer, atlas, PI. 17. 10 A. E. Nordenskiold, Facsimile-Atlas, PI. 46. Ibid.. PI. 47.