Or the case may be put thus: If the fauna and natural products described are merely the monstrosities of Celtic fiction taken with a grain of Icelandic salt, how comes it that they invariably correspond with the actual facts of the countries to which the earliest discoverers of America would most probably have come? Indisputably this is the case until we come to Straumsfjord, though not much stress can be laid on the circumstance that descriptions so brief and general as those of Helluland and Markland happen to be accurate. The episode of the Irish runners appears indeed to have been inserted out of its proper order, and while not impossible may embody a distinct and less reliable tradition, and in the case of the whale incident the details given by Hauk may be rejected in favour of the simpler account given in the Flatey Book. But there seems no good reason to doubt that a stranded whale did actually provide food for the explorers, or to regard, as Dr. Nansen does, this incident as borrowed from St. Brendan. The second song of Thorhall the Hunter, generally admitted to be a contemporary production, and anyhow the oldest part of the existing story, makes a plain reference to such an episode when it speaks of ‘boiling whales’. Whales moreover figure extensively in the legends collected from the Algonquins and Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia and New England by C. G. Leland, while Douglas, in his Summary of the planting of the British North American Settlements (1760), refers to whales setting in along shore by Cape Cod, and records that the back of Long Island, where small whales affect the flats, was the first place of the English whale-fishery. To eat whale-meat, even without the pressure of hunger, was quite natural for an Icelander, for Troil writes in his _Letters on Iceland_ (1780), with special reference to the ‘reydur’, the name applied to the whale in question in the Flatey Book, ‘they are all considered very dainty food; and the Icelanders say that the flesh has the taste of beef.’ With regard to the whale incident, therefore—at any rate as recorded in the simpler version—it may be said, first, that it appears to be corroborated by contemporary allusion, secondly that it was perfectly consistent with the local natural history, and lastly that there was at any rate no need for an Icelander to go to Ireland for stories of whales being used as food. Dr. Nansen’s case accordingly breaks down in regard to the whale. The other salient feature mentioned in connexion with Straumsfjord is the bird-island. This Dr. Nansen dismisses as ‘evidently an entirely Northern feature, brought in to decorate the tale, and brought in so infelicitously that they are made to find all this mass of eggs in the autumn’. He further denies the existence of any breeding-grounds of importance even so far south as Nova Scotia. Now, in the first place, the statement that the eggs were gathered in the autumn is not the saga-writer’s but Dr. Nansen’s. The