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 him greatly. He accosted the Northmen in their own tongue and showed a knowledge of Iceland. Finally he permitted the Norsemen to go, with the warning that they had better leave the country and never return. He gave Gudleif a gold ring which, when he went back to Iceland, the people to whom it was shown knew to be Bjorn's, who had vanished years before. In this passage there is nothing to identify the strange land with Ireland the Great, except the allusion to the Irish tongue. The identification has been the work of later scribes, and the story has much of the fabulous and improbable about it; for example, the portentous length of the voyage, and the presence of horses on the American mainland.

With these Norse passages may be given the vague tradition, said to be recorded in the early Irish chronicles, that "Ireland the Great was known to the west, a great country"; and the mention in the Arabian geographer Edrisius in the twelfth century of "Irandah-al-Kabirah," or Ireland the Great, as lying a day's sail beyond "Rslandah," which is assumed to be a copyist's error for "Islandah."

Enthusiasts for the Irish discovery have made the most of these passages, and there has been the usual attempt to find philological resemblances to the Gaelic in the languages of the American natives. Ireland the Great has been variously assumed to lie about the mouth of the St. Lawrence, south of this on the Floridian coast, in Mexico, in Cuba, Brazil, and the Azores. There is no ground in history for any of these identifications. Beauvois, indeed, has seen in the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, who came from Tula, some allusion to Irish missionaries from Thule, and has found in Mexican rites traces of Celtic Christian ritual. But all this is guess-work, however ingenious. It is sufficient to know for certain that the Irish, about the time when the Norsemen were beginning to appear on their coast, or even earlier, had sailed to the Orkneys, Shetlands, Faroes, and Iceland, and that there was a general tradition amongst the Norsemen, and even in Ireland, long before the voyages of Columbus, to the effect that beyond the Atlantic lay a country