ARTIFICIAL SHELL-DEPOSITS. 219 



killed by the men are in fact cleansed by the women beside or in the cottage 

 itself, and the refuse after the cleansing or the meal is thrown away — seldom 

 far from the cottage-door. Even now, in the course of years, a heap is fre- 

 quently collected as truly circular as if it had been drawn with a pair of com- 

 passes round the door as a centre. On examining its contents, it is found to 

 consist of a black, fat earth, formed of decayed refuse — frequently bits of bone 

 gnawed asunder and broken, shells, especially those of Mi/tilus, lost or broken 

 household-goods, etc. This bone-mixed earth most likely contains, like guano, 

 not only considerable quantities of phosphoric acid, but also ammoniac salts, 

 and it may happen that the trade of Greenland may find in this a valuable 

 article of export. 



" As the kitchen-midden dates from the stone age in Greenland, — which 

 undoubtedly extended beyond the epoch at which the whalers first began to visit 

 these coasts, — we find in it arrow-heads, skin-scrapers, and other instruments of 

 various kinds in stone, and especially a quantity of stone flakes knocked off in 

 forming the instruments, easily recognizable, not only by their form, but by their 

 consisting of stones — chalcedon}', agate, and esjDecially green jasper (called by 

 the Greenlanders ' angmak ') — not met with in the gneiss-formation, but only 

 at certain spots in the basalt-region of Disko or the peninsula of Noursoak. 

 One sometimes finds smaller instruments of clear quartz, also half-wrought 

 crystals of the same mineral. Everything shows that the material was carefully 

 chosen among such minerals as united the necessary hardness with absence of 

 cleavage and a flat conchoidal fractui'e. Among minerals, in general, the differ- 

 ent varieties of quartz (rock-crystal, agate, chalcedony, flint, and jasper) are the 

 only ones which fully satisfy these conditions ; and it is therefore almost exclu- 

 s,ively these minerals that the various races of man have chosen for making their 

 chipped (not ground) stone instruments. 



" The two largest of the old house-sites, among which we were now resting 

 (near the ice-fjord of Jakobshavn, West Greenland), lay so near the sea that 

 their bases were washed by the water. A small stream had found its way 

 through one of them, and had thus not only exposed a section of the kitchen- 

 midden, but also subjected a part of it to a washing-process, in consequence of 

 which bits of bone and other heavier objects lay clean-washed at the bottom of 

 the channel and in the hollows of the gneiss-slabs of the shore. These were 

 - carefully examined, and a niimber of stone instruments and stone chips were 

 collected. There were no traces of iron ; but we found a small oval perforated 

 piece of copper, which had evidently once served as an ornament. At the largest 

 site a tolerably thick circular stone wall, eight or ten feet high, and twenty-six 

 in section, was still distinguishable, divided into two unequal portions bj' a 

 party-wall. The entrance seems to have led into the larger of these areas, judg- 

 ing from the extensive kitchen-midden just outside it. In one of the other heaps 



