Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Blaðsíða 66

56 NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS
most intelligent, easy-seated and sure-footed of animals; it would
be difficult to desire a pleasanter and, at the same time, more
effective kind of bodily exercise.— Notwithstanding the many
drawbacks encountered, especially the struggles with a moist
arctic winter, cases of extreme old-age are not uncommon in
Iceland. The number of living persons over ninety years of
age, as the island’s statistics show, is, in proportion to its
80,000 inhabitants, noticeably large; and an article, covering
a longer period, by a student of the popular life of his native
land (see the illustrated journal “Sunnanfari ” III, pp. 6—7,
13—14) gives the names and stories of many Icelandic centen-
arians in the past, one of whom, as is asserted, reached the
venerable age of 113 years. — The health-statistics of Iceland show
a constant improvement. Formerly deaths of infants where far
too numerous, but drier and more wholesome dwellings have
greatly lowered the rate.— It is hardly necessary to refer to the
influence upon the mind, and through that upon the body, which
the novel world he enters, when he sets foot upon the shores
of Iceland, inevitably produces on the brain-tired intellectual
labourer. Here he finds something fresh — vastly different from
the always same and more or less wearisome hotel and casino
life, which he lives through in the watering-places of the rest
of Europe. Here are mountains unlike the mountains he knows,
plains and valleys and lakes and glaciers and fountains and
cascades such as he has never seen, surroundings which have
not the tameness of familiarity; a past, which is strange to him,
and a present abounding in novelty. Such a change of climate
as this refreshes the mind as it heals the body. — Of all trav-
ellers the keen-eyed Burton best sums up the general effect
upon the summer sojourner in Iceland: “It is strange how her
beauties grow upon him. Doubtless the scenery depends far
more upon colour and complexion than in the genial lands of
the lower temperates. But during the delightfully mild and
pleasant weather of July and August, seen through a medium