Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/637

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572 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s.. i. 18^9

expected to shed light on the origin of certain antiquarian remains now existing on Charles river, Mass., and elsewhere in America. Dr GuSmundsson is the author of a standard work on the subject, bearing the title House Building in Iceland in Saga Times (1898). As the head of the exploring party he selected Thorsteinn Erlingsson, who started from Copenhagen on June 1 stand arrived at Reykjavik on the nth, whence he started for the eastern districts of the island, where travel- ing is extremely difficult from want of good roads and owing to the lack of transportation facilities and the severity of the weather. After ex- amining over 218 ruins, Erlingsson returned to Reykjavik on October 1st. The remains which he visited and excavated were found to be of in- tense interest, for many of them are over four hundred years old, and consist of long and square houses, hillside cots with pavements, mounds, things (open-air law-courts), and doom rings, irrigation and drainage ditches, river dams, hithes (harbors), shipdocks or nausts, grave-hills, farms, and forts. Photographing was made quite difficult owing to wind and rain ; nevertheless the photographic illustrations in the volume give excellent representations of most of the objects observed and studied. It seems that from Mr Grand's resume" in French many things can be better understood than from the English rendering of the Danish original. A large map and three indexes are subjoined and make reference easy. The method adopted by Miss Horsford for com- paring the antiquarian remains in New England with similar structures in Iceland, the home of the Norse discoverers of Vineland, is most praiseworthy. The present work supplements that undertaken by Miss Horsford's father, the late Prof. Eben Norton Horsford, as well as her own investigations which have borne fruit in a paper published in the National Geographic Magazine (1898, pp. 73-84) under the title Dwellings of the Saga Time in Greenland, Iceland, and Vineland. In this paper the "Saga time" of Scandinavia is estimated to begin about 875 a.d., and to end about 150 years later, for this is the period of the discovery, colonization, and early history of Iceland as well as of Scandinavia. A. S. Gatschet.

Hondurenismos. Vocabulario de los provincialismos de Honduras. Por Alberto MembreSo. Secunda edicion corregida y aumentada. Tegucigalpa : 1897. 8°, xiv, 269 pp.

The limited acquaintance which those of the outside world have of Honduras, its history, culture, and languages, makes acceptable any contribution that is likely to render knowledge concerning its interest- ing and diversified population. Among the two thousand words

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