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WORK OF F. W. LUCAS 137 tery and monk-ruled village of dome-topped houses on the slope of a volcanic mountain far up the impossible ice-bound eastern coast, with house-warming, cooking, and hothouse gardening by subterranean heat and a continual commerce maintained with northern Europe though all this had never been heard of before. It is true that Major was handicapped by a belief, formerly prevalent, that the eastern coast of Greenland was the site of the Eastern Settlement of the Norsemen, though in modern times that coast is subjected to conditions which make life hardly practicable; whereas it is now conclusively established that both of the Norse settlements were on the relatively pleasant southwestern coast, one settlement being more easterly and the other more westerly. But at the best such interpretations run the gauntlet of the reader's involuntary skepticism. It is often easier to discard the statements altogether. THE WORK OF F. W. LUCAS Lucas, writing some years afterward, with the benefit of recently discovered maps and information, has chosen this destructive alternative for nearly the whole Zeno narration: denying that Nicolo Zeno had any map of a former generation to restore; styling his own keenly critical and exhaustive pro- duction "an indictment," and branding the book under considera- tion as a forgery throughout with, necessarily, some true things in it. He has gone far toward making good his case. Some things not fully accounted for suggest that there may have been a basis of genuine material, a nucleus of truth; but it must have been very slight. Major and his preservative school relied chiefly on three points of coincidence: a fairly good description of that most unusual boat, the kayak of the Eskimos; the hot water of the monastery already mentioned; and the general geography of Greenland, which is shown more accurately than on many maps of the sixteenth century and later. But Lucas points out that the history of Olaus Magnus, or other northern sources, might have supplied the kayak to Zeno the younger. This may seem rather