It is indeed vain for us to hope for evidence of the same definite kind as that which establishes beyond question the presence of the Northmen on the sites of their long-settled colonies in Greenland. Their visits to the Canadian seaboard were transitory; and any attempt at settlement there failed. Yet without the definite memorials of the old Norse colonists recovered in the present century on the sites of their Greenland settlements, it would probably have proved vain to identify them now. The coast of Nova Scotia is indented with inlets, and estuaries of creeks and rivers, suggesting some vague resemblance to the Hóp, or creek of the old Sagas. Whether any one of them presents adequate features for identification with the descriptions furnished in their accounts has yet to be ascertained. But there is every motive to stimulate us to a careful survey of the coast in search of any probable site of the Vinland of the old Northmen. Slight as are the details available for such a purpose, they are not without some specific definiteness, which the Rhode Island antiquaries turned to account, not without a warning to us in their too confident assumption of results. Dr. E. B. Tylor, in his address to the section of anthropology at the Montreal meeting of the British Association, after referring to the Icelandic records of the explorations of the hardy sea-rovers from Greenland, as too consistent to be refused belief as to the main facts, thus proceeded: “They sailed some way down the American coast. But where are we to look for the most southerly points which the Sagas mention as reached in Vineland? Where was Keel-ness where Thorvald’s ship ran aground, and Cross-ness where he was buried when he died by the Skræling’s arrow? Rafn, in the _Antiquitates Americanæ_, confidently maps out these places about the promontory of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and this has been repeated since from book to book. I must plead guilty to having cited Rafn’s map before now, but when with reference to the present meeting I consulted our learned editor of Scandinavian records at Oxford, Mr. Gudbrand Vigfusson, and afterwards went through the original passages in the Sagas with Mr. York Powell, I am bound to say that the voyages of the Northmen ought to be reduced to more moderate limits. It appears that they crossed from Greenland to Labrador (Helluland), and thence sailing more or less south and west, in two stretches of two days each, they came to a place near where wild grapes grew, whence they called the country Vineland. This would, therefore, seem to have been somewhere about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and it would be an interesting object for a yachting cruise to try down from the east coast of Labrador a fair four days’ sail of a Viking ship, and identify, if possible, the sound between the island and the ness, the river running out of the lake into the sea, the long stretches of sand, and the other local features mentioned in the Sagas.” A fresh