DR. NANSEN'S NEW BOOK.

Mataura Ensign, 15 December 1911, Page 9

DR. NANSEN'S NEW BOOK.

To-day is published the remarkable book (states the 'Daily Mail' of November 2) in which Fridtjof Nansen, the great Arctic explorer, tells the romantic story of exploration in the North in the early ages of mankind. The result of profound and exhaustive research, Dr. Nansen's book will at once take rank as the standard work on a period of the world's history of which hitherto almost nothing has been known. The scholar-explorer has tested ©very legend every saga, from the earliest Greek legends of the Fortunate Islands to the mediaeval chronicles. Bis work is a colossal monument to instructed industry. Astonishing conclusions are quietly recorded in these pages. He establishes the discovery of America by Norwegian rovers 500 years before the voyage of Columbus. He tells thrilling tales of pioneer wanderings to Greenland, Newfoundland and Labrador. The most varied customs confirm his researches. The Canadian game of lacrosse, he points out, resembles in all essentials the Norse game of "Knattleikr," described in Icelandic sagas. Hie book closes on the tragedy of a people. The Eskimos, Dr. Nansen sadly concludes, are doomed to extinction. For a long time the northern hunter race has held its own against European civilisation. Now it is giving way, impoverished, weakening, before the advance of modern methods and' modern comfort.