[Footnote 195: Some people must have queer notions about the lapse of past time. I have more than once had this question put to me in such a way as to show that what the querist really had in mind was some vague impression of the time when oaks and chestnuts, vines and magnolias, grew luxuriantly over a great part of Greenland! But that was in the Miocene period, probably not less than a million years ago, and has no obvious bearing upon the deeds of Eric the Red.] [Footnote 196: Bardsen, _Descriptio Groenlandiae_, appended to Major's _Voyages of the Venetian Brothers_, etc., pp. 40, 41; and see below, p. 242.] [Footnote 197: Zahrtmann, _Journal of Royal Geographical Society_, London, 1836, vol. v. p. 102. On this general subject see J. D. Whitney, "The Climate Changes of Later Geological Times," in _Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy at Harvard College_, Cambridge, 1882, vol. vii. According to Professor Whitney there has also been a deterioration in the climate of Iceland.] [Footnote 198: One must not too hastily infer that the mean temperature of points on the American coast south of Davis strait would be affected in the same way. The relation between the phenomena is not quite so simple. For example, a warm early spring on the coast of Greenland increases the discharge of icebergs from its fiords to wander down the Atlantic ocean; and this increase of floating ice tends to chill and dampen the summers at least as far South as Long Island, if not farther.] [Footnote 199: Rink's _Danish Greenland_, pp. 27, 96, 97.] [Sidenote: With the Northmen once in Greenland, the discovery of the American continent was almost inevitable.] [Sidenote: Voyages for timber.]