The discussion of these scientific notions has its chief value in showing to what extent the Norwegians of the thirteenth century were acquainted with the best theories of the age as to the great facts of the universe. The author’s own contribution to the scientific learning of his time lies almost exclusively in the field of geography. “Beyond comparison the most important geographical writer of the medieval North,” says Dr. Nansen, “and at the same time one of the first in the whole of medieval Europe, was the unknown author who wrote the _King’s Mirror_.... If one turns from contemporary or earlier European geographical literature, with all its superstition and obscurity, to this masterly work, the difference is very striking.”[45] This is doubtless due to the fact that our author was not a cloistered monk who was content to copy the ideas and expressions of his predecessors with such changes as would satisfy a theological mind, but a man who had been active in the secular world and was anxious to get at real facts. Footnote 45: Nansen, _In Northern Mists_, II, 242. Among the chapters devoted to scientific lore the author has introduced several which are ostensibly intended to serve the purpose of entertainment; the author seems to fear that the interest of his readers is likely to flag, if the dry recital of physical facts is continued unbroken. It is in these chapters, which profess to deal with the marvels of Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and the Arctic seas, that he introduces his geographical data. In the description of Greenland are included such important and practical subjects as the general character of the land, the great ice fields, the products of the country, wild animals, and a few facts from the economic life of the people. In the chapters on Iceland the author limits himself to certain physical features, such as glaciers, geysers, mineral springs, volcanoes, and earthquakes. He also gives a “description of the animal world of the northern seas to which there is no parallel in the earlier literature of the world.”[46] He enumerates twenty-one different species of whales[47] and describes several of them with some fulness. He mentions and describes six varieties of seals[48] and also gives a description of the walrus. The marvelous element is represented by detailed accounts of the “sea-hedges” (probably sea quakes) on the coasts of Greenland, the merman, the mermaid, and the kraken.[49] But on the whole these chapters give evidence of careful, discriminating observation and a desire to give accurate knowledge. Footnote 46: Nansen, _In Northern Mists_, II, 243. Footnote 47: _Ibid._ “If we make allowance for three of them being probably sharks and for two being perhaps alternative names for the same whale, the total corresponds to the number of species that are known in northern waters.” Footnote 48: