AMERICA BEFORE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2434, 6 December 1892, Page 1

AMERICA BEFORE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

M. Napoleon Ney 5 who presides over the French Society of Commercial Geograpy, contends that Columbus did not discover America. He thinks that in prehistoric times Eastern Asia and North America were joined by a strip of land, since almost entirely submerged. The Orkneys, Shettands, Iceland, Greenland, etc,,, were but stepping stones, as it wev*, between the Old World and the New. The " Standard's " Paria correspondent sends the following extract from a paper by \L Ney, in which he says :—" I JiWO soon a tomb of masonry disfavored in Boston Bay at the end of last century. It contained a skeleton and au iron handle at" a sword. The skeleton wa.?, Vw»* of a man of the white race,., and the sword handle was. of European make previous to the fifteenth century —that is to say, it Jated back a century earlier than Christopher Columbus, At the Smithsonian Institute I e,aw the facsimile of the curious inscription cf Dighton Writing Rock, which is written in Runic characters, accompanied with cryptographic signs j and drawings relating to th. 6 adventures of the Scandinavians in Vinland. It signifies ;'* One hundred and thirty'One me,?, of the North occupied this country with Thornfhm.' But a more important inscription is that of Arrow Head. I have examined it on the bank of the Potomac, three kilometres from the falls of that river. It marked the tomb of a Norman chief's wife, killed by an arrow, and, like the other inscription, is graven in the rock in Runic characters. Translated into English it runs : —' Here lies Syasi,the fair one of Western Iceland, the widow of Koldr, sister of Thorgr, by her father ; aged twenty- five years. God be merciful to her.' In the tomb were found three teeth, a fragment of a large bone which fell to dust, various toilet articles in bronze, ill-formed and full of holes, two fragments of a necklace, and two coins of the Lower Empire. The fact of those Roman coins being in the possession of a Norman chief is not extraordinary, as the men of the North—Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes— were sought after to recruit the guard of the Emperors of Constantinople."