30 DANIEL BRUUN. 
themselves to the slightly different circumstances nature here offered. 
They built houses of the same sort as in their mother-country, kept 
cows, sheep, goats and horses besides which they engaged in the 
capture of seals and whales, also fishing, especially in the rivers rich 
with salmon, but also in the fiords and on sea; as hunting. reindeer, 
hares and bears etc. gave good results, so the conditions of existence 
were far from being as hard as one would be inclined to believe. 
Аз is known, there was a time when the conditions of nature in 
Greenland were quite different from what they are now. Greenland has, 
at an earlier geological period, had a tropical climate, during which time 
luxurious primeval forests spread over the country, leaves of which one 
still finds impressions of in stones; but this vegetation ceased suddenly. 
Volcanie masses covered everything. Their degree of heat, and 
enormous pressure transformed a part of the vegetation to coal. Later 
on it turned cold again, so cold that the whole country became a wilder- 
ness of ice. Mountains and valleys disappeared under the covering of 
ice, and only the pointed peaks of the highest rose above the ice. — 
Greenland’s glacial period corresponds to that of Europe. When the 
ice later on had retreated somewhat, the razed rocks became visible 
and the present narrow coast-land, the broadest part of whıch is 100 
miles, lay exposed with its polished surface, and its deep inland fiords, 
such as we see it at the present day. High precipitous mountains, about 
2000 meters, rise out of the sea, forming long peninsulas between the 
fiords. Beyond lay the rocks and a shoal of islands. Lakes and rivers 
are to be found in several places. 
Greenland’s rocks are of an old date. They are composed of prim- 
eval rocks, gnejs and crystalline slates. A newer formation is only 
found in parts, but a great deal of it is cut away by the ice. In geolo- 
gical respects Greenland is a very old country. Immediately after the 
primeval time the red sandstone (the socalled marble) was formed, which 
is found in Tunugdliarfikfiord and Igalikofiord. This sandstone marble 
has played a great part as building material for the colonists. 
Although the parts of Greenland’s west coast inhabited by the 
Norsemen, lie in the same latitude as Christiania, Bergen and Trond- 
hjem, the presence of the ice masses and the polar stream effects the 
climate and nature, so that it resembles the northernmost part of Nor- 
way, north of the polareirele or Iceland’s Northland. 
The chmate is therefore decidedly Polarclimate. 
Greenland’s short summer is nearly over at the end of August. Al- 
though it can still be warm in the beginning of September, but the water 
soon begins to freeze, and the fiords are covered with ice at the end of 
October or the beginning of November. The weather becomes severer, 
the northern winds predominate and the storms break loose; but the 
fog disappears. 
In the fiords where the glaciers disembogue, one sees icebergs the 
whole summer. Very often flakes of Polar-ice come also into the fiords, 
