A popular error, once started on its career, is as hard to kill as a cat. Otherwise it would be surprising to find, in so meritorious a book as Oscar Peschel's _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, Stuttgart, 1877, p. 82, an unsuspecting reliance upon Rafn's ridiculous interpretation of this Algonquin pictograph. In an American writer as well equipped as Peschel, this particular kind of blunder would of course be impossible; and one is reminded of Humboldt's remark, "Il est des recherches qui ne peuvent s'executer que pres des sources memes." _Examen critique_, etc., tom. ii. p. 102. In old times, I may add, such vagaries were usually saddled upon the Phoenicians, until since Rafn's time the Northmen have taken their place as the pack-horses for all sorts of antiquarian "conjecture."] [Footnote 259: See Palfrey's _History of New England_, vol. i. pp. 57-59; Mason's _Reminiscences of Newport_, pp. 392-407. Laing (_Heimskringla_, pp. 182-185) thinks the Yankees must have intended to fool Professor Rafn and the Royal Society of Antiquaries at Copenhagen; "Those sly rogues of Americans," says he, "dearly love a quiet hoax;" and he can almost hear them chuckling over their joke in their club-room at Newport. I am afraid these Yankees were less rogues and more fools than Mr. Laing makes out.] [Footnote 260: Laing, _Heimskringla_, vol. i. p. 181.] [Sidenote: If the Northmen had founded a successful colony, they would have introduced domestic cattle into the North American fauna;] [Sidenote: and such animals could not have vanished and left no trace of their existence.]