"I have told you something of the evidence that Leif Ericson was the first European to tread the great land southwest of Greenland. His ancestry was of the early Pilgrims, or Puritans, who, to escape oppression, emigrated, 50,000 of them in sixty years, from Norway to Iceland, as the early Pilgrims came to Plymouth. They established and maintained a republican form of government, which exists to this day, with nominal sovereignty in the King of Denmark, and the flag, like our own, bears an eagle in its fold. Toward the close of the 10th century a colony, of whom Leif's father and family were members, went out from Iceland to Greenland. In about 999, Leif, a lad at the time of his father's immigration, went to Norway, and King Olaf, impressed with his grand elements of character, gave him a commission to carry the Christianity to which, he had become a convert to Greenland. He set out at once, and, with his soul on fire with the grandeur of his message, within a year accomplished the conversion and baptism of the whole colony, including his father. "To Leif a monument has been erected. In thus fulfilling the duty we owe to the first European navigator who trod our shores, we do no injustice to the mighty achievement of the Genoese discoverer under the flags of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, inspired by the idea of the rotundity of the earth, and with the certainty of reaching Asia by sailing westward sufficiently long, set out on a new and entirely distinct enterprise, having a daring and a conception and an intellectual train of research and deduction as its foundation quite his own. How welcome to Boston will be the proposition to set up in 1892, a fit statue to Columbus. "We unveil to-day the statue in which Anne Whitney has expressed so vividly her conception of this leader, who, almost nine centuries ago, first trod our shores." The statue, however, is purely fanciful, and gives no idea either of the personal appearance or costume of the great sailor, who has waited for this justice to his memory much longer than Bruno and many other heroes of human progress. Columbus may have been original in his ideas, but it was the Northmen who led in exploration. It was they who changed the old flat-bottomed ships of the Roman Empire to the deep keels which made the exploration of the Atlantic ocean possible. This act of justice has been prompted by the appreciative sentiments of the late Ole Bull, and the efforts of Miss Marie Brown, who has lectured on the subject. Miss Brown says that Columbus learned of the discovery of America at Rome, and also at Iceland, which he visited in 1477. Indeed, Columbus was not seeking the America of the Norsemen, but was sailing to find the Indies.