In Ari’s Íslendíngabók, in the passage relating to the colonization of Greenland (see Appendix and cf. p. 95), it is stated that dwellings and fragments of canoes had been discovered. And the writer goes on explicitly: ‘and stone smith-work (weapons) _such_ that from _it_ (steinsmíði þat, es af því) one may understand that there that kind of folk had passed (farit) who have settled in (bygt) Wineland, and the Greenlanders call Skrælings.’ One could hardly have a clearer statement that the deduction as to the former presence of this people in Greenland was based on such traces as are here mentioned, and on nothing else. It seems _prima facie_ most improbable that such guarded terms should be used if the Greenlanders had at this time actually met the Eskimo, and thus provided themselves with a much more conclusive proof of their existence. Moreover we have, besides the express terms used by Ari, the apparently intentional contrast to which I have alluded elsewhere between the transitory and past movement of the Eskimo through the one country (farit) and the permanent residence of the savages in Wineland (bygt). And it would seem a legitimate and almost irresistible inference to draw from this passage that accounts of savages with canoes and stone weapons (cf. the ‘hellustein’ which slew Thorbrand Snorrison in Wineland) were forthcoming at a time when the Norsemen had no other source but America from which the existence of such things could be known to them. Dr. Nansen however concludes that Ari’s silence as to the Eskimo themselves was due to the fact that ‘they were supernatural beings of whom it was best to say nothing’.[84] It is rather difficult to see, if this were so, why Ari should have felt himself at liberty to mention the existence of these people in Wineland any more than in Greenland, or why he should have thought it any better to speak of the inferred existence of the Eskimo than to record their actual occurrence. Further, we may fairly demand where it is that Dr. Nansen finds in Icelandic literature any reluctance to mention supernatural beings, where these are believed to have existed. Altogether it appears to me an understatement of the case to say that no meeting between the Norsemen and the Eskimo prior to the date of the Íslendíngabók seems at all probable.