From an editorial in Public Opinion, Washington.
Modern historians are pretty generally agreed that America was actually first made known to the Eastern world by the indefatigable Norsemen. Yet, in spite of this fact, Columbus has been, and still continues to be, revered as the one man to whose genius and courage the discovery of the New World is due. Miss Brown, in her "Icelandic Discoverers," justly says it should be altogether foreign to American institutions and ideas of liberty and honor to countenance longer the worship of a false idol. The author first proceeds to set forth the evidence upon which the claims of the Norsemen rest. The author charges that the heads of the Roman Catholic church were early cognizant of this discovery of the Norsemen, but that they suppressed this information. The motives for this concealment are charged to their well-known reluctance to allow any credit to non-Catholic believers, under which head, at that time, the Norsemen were included. They preferred that the New World should first be made known to Southern Europe by adherents to the Roman Catholic faith. Most damaging evidence against Columbus' having originated, unaided, the idea of a western world or route to India is furnished by the fact that he visited Iceland in person in the spring of 1477, when he must have heard rumors of the early voyages. He is known to have visited the harbor at Hvalfjord, on the south coast of Iceland, at a time when that harbor was most frequented, and also at the same time when Bishop Magnus is known to have been there. They must have met, and, as they had means of communicating through the Latin language, would naturally have spoken of these distant countries. We have no hint of the object of this visit of Columbus, for he scrupulously avoids subsequent mention of it; but the author pleases to consider it as a secret mission, instigated by the Church for the purpose of obtaining all available information concerning the Norse discoveries. Certain it is that soon after his return to Spain we find him petitioning the King and Queen for a grant of ships and men to further the enterprise; and he was willing to wait for more than fourteen years before he obtained them. His extravagant demands of the King and Queen concerning the rights, titles, and percentage of all derived from the countries "he was about to discover," can hardly be viewed in any other light than that of positive knowledge concerning their existence.
PULCI'S PROPHECY.
Luigi Pulci, an Italian poet. Born at Florence in 1431; died about 1487.
Men shall descry another hemisphere,
Since to one common center all things tend;
So earth, by curious mystery divine,
Well balanced hangs amid the starry spheres.
At our antipodes are cities, states,
And thronged empires ne'er divined of yore.
CHRISTOPHER, THE CHRIST-BEARER.
George Payne Quackenbos, an American teacher and educational writer. Born in New York, 1826; died December 24, 1881.
Full of religious enthusiasm, he regarded this voyage to the western seas as his peculiar mission, and himself—as his name, Christopher, imports—the appointed Christ-bearer, or gospel-bearer, to the natives of the new lands he felt that he was destined to discover.
PLEADING WITH KINGS FOR A NEW WORLD.
The Rev. Myron Reed, a celebrated American clergyman of the present day.