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Show 138 STE:('rES AND DESERTS. Germany, under the Othos, and under Frederic Barbarossa, in the lOth and 12th centuries, and eYen, as is related by Cornelius Nepos ( ed. Van Staveren, cur. Hardili, t. ii. 1820, p. 35G), Pomponius Mela (lib. iii. cap. 5, § 8), and Pliny (Hist. Nat., t. ii. p. 67), when Quintus Metellus Celer was Pro-consul in Gaul, may be explained by similar effects of currents and north-west winds of long continuance. A king of the Boii, others say of the Suevi, gave the shipwrecked dark-colored men to Metellus Celer. Gomara, in his Historia Gen. de las Indias (Saragossa, 1553, fol. vii.), refers to this account, and considers the Indians spoken of in it to have been natives of Labrador. "Si ya no fuesen de Tierra del Labrador, y los tuviesen, los Romanos par Indianos engafiados en el c~lor." The appearance of Esquimaux on the northern coasts of E~~ope may be believed to have occurred mote: often in earlier times, because we know, from the researches of Rask and Finn Magnusen, that in the 11th and 12th centuries this race extended in considerable numbers, under the name of the Skralinges of Labrador, even as far south as the "good Vinland ," i. e. the coast of Massachusetts and Connecticut. (Cosmos, bd. ii. s. 270; English ed. p. 234; Exam en Critique de l'Hist. de la Geographic, t. ii. pp. 224-278.) As the winter cold of the most northern parts of Scandinavia is softened by the influence of the Gulf Stream, by which American tropical fruits (cocoa nuts, and seeds of the Mimosa scandens and the Anacardium occidentale) are cast upon the shore beyond the 62d degree of latitude, so does Iceland also occasionally enjoy the beneficial influence of the extension of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream far to the northward. The coasts of Iceland as well as those of the Faroe Islands, receive a great deal of driftwood, which, coming formerly in greater abundance, was cut into beams and planks and used for building timber. Fruits of tropical plants, collected on the coast of Iceland, between Raufarhavn and V apnafiord, testify the movement of the waters from the southward. (Sartorius von Waltershausen, physisch-geogruphische Skizze von Island, 1847, s. 22-35.) ( 2.:;) p. 33.-" Neither L eC'ideas nor othe1· L£chens." In northern countries, the earth, if left bare, soon becomes |
