“6. Water to the use of mariners may only be taken in places pointed out by the police. As water money every vessel of the burthen of above forty tons pays for each voyage one rixdollar Danish; of less burthen, half a rixdollar.
“Given in the Police Office of Reykjavik, July 4, 1870,
(Signed) A. Thorsteinson.
“N.B.—This advertisement, which is delivered by the pilot, and from the Police Office, is made for the use of sailors. Wanting notion of it does not exempt from liability to punishment for offences, mentioned or not mentioned here, that are committed by mariners.”
[241] The “Napoleon book” (p. 364), gives a sketch of a “mine de criolithe:” one of the veins embedded in granite is eighty feet thick. Mr Walker (Peirce’s Report, p. 3) is mistaken in asserting that cryolite is found only in Greenland, but doubtless the largest known supplies are there, the development being due in great part to American (U.S.) enterprise. The natives used it only in the pulverised state—like quartz—to “lengthen out” their snuff; and similarly the “Red Indians” of the Brazil utilised their diamonds as counters. This double fluoride of sodium and aluminium, popularly called natural soda, is a mineral of ever increasing value; it is employed in the manufacture of soda and soda-salts, hydrofluoric acid, fine glass, and earthenware almost infrangible; the residue makes a flux (“Steven’s flux,” etc.) capital for the treatment of difficult metallic ores. Perhaps the chief use is in the manufacture of aluminium and its alloys, a noble metal which can be carried to white heat before it oxidises, and whose brilliancy is unaltered by sulphuretted hydrogen, water, acids, salts, and organic matter. The price till lately was about one-third that of silver, but increased cheapness has extended the use, especially in coinage and jewellery. Tenacious as silver, sonorous, easily melted and moulded, about as hard as soft iron, and one-third the weight of zinc; it is valuable for watch-cases, mirrors, spectacle-frames, opera and field glasses, hand-bells, pendulum-rods, small weights and balances, chemical apparatus, instruments of precision, and articles where lightness is required. It has also been converted into dinner services and cooking apparatus, in which, unlike tin and copper, it is absolutely harmless. The common form is bronze d’aluminium, with one of that metal to ten parts of copper; the tenacity of the alloy is about that of steel.
[242] This again is the popular assertion which has been strongly opposed by Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín (see note at end of Section III.). The reader, however, will observe that the patriotic Icelander confesses to the figures in the text, as matters now stand.
[243] The political sense of 120 franklins, several of which composed the English shire, is unknown to Iceland.
[244] The “Sharker,” moreover, pays a variable sum (say 24 skillings) per barrel of oil as an hospital tax, and this is now appropriated to the district physician.
[245] Compare the German Schatze and our Scot in Scot-free, Scot and Shot; Róma-skattr would be Peter’s Pence.
[246] The Icelandic word is Fógeti (low Lat. Vocatus, Germ. Vogtie, a bailiwick, hence “Landvogt” Gessler), which dates from the fourteenth century (Cleasby). It corresponds with the Fowd and Grand Fowd, chief magistrate of the Scoto-Scandinavian islands.
[247] In these pages “$” always refers to the rixdollar, which, like the Brazilian milreis, is half the milreis of Portugal or the dollar of the United States.