The book was intended to correct errors in past natural histories of Iceland, particularly the work of Hamburg mayor Johann Anderson, who had written about the island without ever actually visiting it.
Anderson had relied entirely on accounts from German and Dutch sea captains,[1] but Horrebow lived in Iceland for two years, studying the animals, plants, weather, and geological features.
It was a direct response to a paragraph in Johann Anderson's book, which claimed that snakes could not survive the cold of Iceland.
Horrebow's full chapter was translated into English in an 1870 issue of Notes and Queries: Serpents there are none in Iceland, as our author [Anderson] truly observes.
The phrase "snakes in Iceland" is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is traced to the 1758 translation and defined as "something posited only to be dismissed as non-existent".