VINIC ACIDS, an important group of acids, whose mode of formation may be thus described: When a mixture of concentrated sulphuric acid with any of the alcohols is heated to about 212% chemical action takes place, and the result is the formation of a new coupled or conjugated acid, in which the elements of one molecule of the alcohol and one of sulphuric acid (taken, according to recent views, as are present. In these compounds, the existence of sulphuric acid can no longer be detected by the addi tion of baryta; the new acids forming soluble baryta-salts. As examples of these acids may be mentioned sulpho-methylic acid, HO,C,1130,S,06, and sulpho-etbylic acid, which has been already described under its old name of sulphovinia acid.
VINLAND—i.e., WiNELAND—the name given to the chief settletnent of the early Norwegians in North.America. It is undoubtedly represented in modern times by part of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The first that saw it was Bjarne Herjulfson, who was driven thither by a storm in the summer of 986 A.D. when making a voyage from Iceland to Greeuland, of which country his father, Herjuff, and Eric the Red were the earliest colonists. But Bjarne did not touch the land, which was first visited by Leif the Lucky, a son of Eric the Red, about 1000 A.D. The latter built a number of wooden houses, which were called Lelfshidir (Leif's bothies?). A German of the name of Tyr ker, who accompanied him, noticed the grape growing there, as in his native country, and hence Leif called the region "Vinland." Two years after, Leif's brother, Thor•
weld, arrived, and in the summer of 1003 led an expedition along the coast of New Eng• land, southward, but was killed the year following in an encounter with the natives. The most famous of the Norwegian explorers, however, was Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Ice lander, who had married Gudrid, widow of Thorstein, a son of Eric the Red, and who in 1007, sailed from Greenland to Vinland with a crew of 160 men, where lie remained for three years, and then returned, after which no further attempts at colonization were made. Rafn (q.v.), in his Antiquitates Americana, has published the most complete collection of the evidence which proves the pre.Columbian colonization of America. See Wilhelmi's Island, Ifritramannaland, Gronland undVinland (Heidelberg, 1842). Both Rafn and Finn Magnuson are excessively anxious to show that Columbus derived his first hints of a new world from the accounts of these old Icelandic expeditions. Their amar park perhaps leads them too far; but, on the other hand, it is well to bear in mind that Finn Magnusen, in one of the early numbers of the Xordisk Tidsskrift for Old. kyndighcd has conclusively established the fact that Columbus did visit Iceland in 1477, 15 years before lie undertook his great expedition across the Atlantic; and it is not at all improbable that he may have heard, while there, something of the long-abandoned Vinland, and so had his adventurous thoughts first turned in that direction.