the originals thus referred to are unknown. To mention the various Churchmen and others who, though in no sense geographers, were expected to deal with the theories of the earth and the universe in connection with their religious doctrines, would make but a tedious list. The view of the sphericity of the earth was not wholly lost. Certain expressions of the Venerable Bede (_c._ 672–735), even if he did not specifically formulate the theory, were capable of that construction, although in 741 we find Virgilius, the Irish bishop of Salzburg, attacked by the Pope for his assertion of the existence of antipodes (or at least an assertion that may bear that construction). Nevertheless, these theories made headway, and from the eleventh century they became more and more acceptable to leaders of learning. Adam of Bremen accepted them; he is also an important figure in other departments of geography. He flourished in the second half of the eleventh century; his history is a specially valuable authority for the Baltic lands and other parts of Scandinavia and Russia. Its fourth book is a _Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis_, for which there was no little material, for not only had holy men from Ireland visited the Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeröe, and Iceland in the sixth and seventh centuries, but the Norsemen had entered upon their period of colonizing activity; besides Great Britain and Ireland they had reached Iceland in 874, Greenland a century later, and Vinland in 1000; and this last, that much-debated[3] landfall situated somewhere on the North American coast south-west of Greenland, is first mentioned by Adam of Bremen. A similar appreciation of north European geography had been shown by King Alfred the Great, who in translating (and freely editing) earlier works had introduced much of the knowledge acquired down to his own time. [3] Not only so in modern times; at least one Scandinavian geographer, of the end of the thirteenth century, was prepared to recognize it as belonging to Africa. [Illustration: Fig. 6.--Beatus’s Map.]