the Blessed and the
Fortunate Isles. It is, perhaps, not unnatural that in the earlier
writers the existence of these remote and mysterious regions should be
linked with the ideas of the Elysian Fields and of the abodes of the
dead. But the later writers, such as Pliny, and Strabo, the geographer,
talked of them as actual places, and tried to estimate how many Roman
miles they must be distant from the coast of Spain.

There were similar legends among the Irish, legends preserved in
written form at least five hundred years before Columbus. They recount
wonderful voyages out into the Atlantic and the discovery of new land.
But all these tales are mixed up with obvious fable, with accounts of
places where there was never any illness or infirmity, and people lived
for ever, and drank delicious wine and laughed all day, and we cannot
certify to an atom of historic truth in them.

Still more interesting, if only for curiosity's sake, are weird stories
that have been unearthed among the early records of the Chinese. These
are older than the Irish legends, and date back to about the sixth
century. According to the Chinese story, a certain Hoei-Sin sailed out
into the Pacific until he was four thousand miles east of Japan. There
he found a new continent, which the Chinese records called Fusang,
because of a certain tree--the fusang tree,--out of the fibres of which
the inhabitants made, not only clothes, but paper, and even food. Here
was truly a land of wonders. There were strange animals with branching
horns on their heads, there were men who could not speak Chinese but
barked like dogs, and other men with bodies painted in strange colours.
Some people have endeavoured to prove by these legends that the Chinese
must have landed in British Columbia, or have seen moose or reindeer,
since extinct, in the country far to the north. But the whole account
is so mixed up with the miraculous, and with descriptions of things
which certainly never existed on the Pacific coast of America, that we
can place no reliance whatever upon it.

The only importance that we can attach to such traditions of the
discovery of unknown lands and peoples on a new continent is their
bearing as a whole, their accumulated effect, on the likelihood of such
discovery before the time of Columbus. They at least make us ready to
attach due weight to the circumstantial and credible records of the
voyages of the Norsemen. These stand upon ground altogether diffe