Thus ended the abortive enterprise of Thorfinn and his company to found, in the eleventh century, a colony of Northmen on the American mainland. The account the survivors brought back told indeed of umbrageous woodland and the tempting vine. But the forest was haunted by the fierce Skrælings, and its coasts open to assault from their canoes. To the race that wrested Normandy from the Carlovingian Frank, and established its jarldoms in Orkney, Caithness, and Northumbria, such a foe might well be deemed contemptible. But the degenerate Franks, and the Angles of Northumbria, tempted the Norse marauder with costly spoils; and only after repeated successful expeditions awakened the desire to settle in the land and make there new homes. Alike to explorers seeking for themselves a home, and to adventurers coveting the victors’ spoils, the Vinland of the Northmen offered no adequate temptation, and so its traditions faded out of memory, or were recalled only as the legend of a fabulous age. At the meeting of the British Association at Montreal in 1884 Mr. R. G. Halliburton read a paper entitled “A Search in British North America for lost Colonies of Northmen and Portuguese.” Documents were quoted by him showing that from A.D. 1500 to 1570 commissions were regularly issued to the Corte Reals and their successors. Cape Breton was colonised by them in 1521; and when Portugal became annexed to Spain in 1680, and Terra Nova passed with it to her rule, she sent colonists to settle there. The site which they occupied, Mr. Halliburton traced to Spanish Harbour (Sydney), Cape Breton, and this he claimed to be the earliest European settlement in North America. For, as for the Northmen’s reputed explorations and attempt at settlement, his verdict is thus briefly summed up: “When we can discover Greenland’s verdant mountains we can also hope to find the vine-clad hills of Vineland the Good.” That, however, is too summary a dismissal of evidence which, if vague, is to every appearance based on authorities as seemingly authentic and trustworthy as those on which many details of the history of early centuries rest. It would manifestly be unwise to discountenance further inquiry by any such sweeping scepticism, or to discourage the hope that local research may yet be rewarded by evidence confirmatory of the reputed visit of Thorfinn and his fellow-explorers to some recognisable point on the Nova-Scotian coast.