230 THE LABRADOR PENINSULA. CHAP. xiv. 



millions of erratics, most of them white. Both birds and 

 beasts seemed to shun so dreary a scene, and only here 

 and there did the mosses and willows appear to be 

 making feeble efforts to rise again in greenness and life, 

 and cover the terrible nakedness of the land. 



In surveying a vast tract of country profusely covered 

 with lichens and mosses, our thoughts naturally turn to 

 the uses of these beautiful plants, and the part they 

 perform in the general economy of nature. Lichens, it is 

 well known, are distributed over every part of the world, 

 but in some regions they acquire a very extraordinary 

 development, and supply food to man and animals, as 

 well as important materials used in the arts. Deriving 

 their food chiefly from the air, they grow upon dead and 

 living plants, upon rocks and stones ; but they appear to 

 prefer certain kinds of rocks in preference to others. 

 We found them most abundantly upon gneiss, and much 

 less frequently upon labradorite : indeed, the uniform 

 purple hue of this rock, when seen in great masses, is 

 probably due to the absence of lichens and mosses, 

 which so frequently beautify the surface of gneissoid 

 hills. First in importance to the wandering Indian in 

 subarctic North .America is, indirectly, the reindeer or 

 caribou moss (Cladonia rangiferina], which at every step 

 inspires the traveller in the Laurentian country with 

 admiration for its beauty, its luxuriance, its wonderful 

 adaptation to the climate, and its value as a source of 

 food to that mainstay of the Indians, and consequently of 

 the fur trade in these regions, the caribou. 



The Laplanders not only depend on it as the prin- 

 cipal food for their herds of domesticated reindeer, but 

 they gather it during the rainy season and give it to their 



