DESCRIPTION OF GREENLAND. 203 



putiug the point with INI. Vormius, jNI. le Grand Muitrc of 

 Denmark, of whose high birth, eminent virtue, and exalted 

 dignity in Denmark (that of the person next in absolute 

 power after tlic king) you have heard in my letters, — this 

 great man, who has honoured me with particular marks of 

 his goodwill, and who took great pleasure in satisfying my 

 curiosity as far as it was possible to do so, told me a circum- 

 stance relating to this subject, which confirmed me in my first 

 opinion that they were horns and not teeth : he said, that 

 the king of Denmark his master, wishing to make a present 

 of a piece of this sort of horn, and wishing it to be parti- 

 cularly beautiful, directed him to saw an entire horn which 

 he had at the stump of the root, where it is thickest and 

 finest. Having sawn one part of the horn, which he thought 

 was solid, he came to a cavity, and was astonished to find 

 within a small horn, of the same shape and composition as 

 the large one. He continued cutting the large one all round 

 without touching the small one, and found the little horn, as 

 well as the cavity inside the larger horn, extended a foot in 

 length ; the rest of the large horn being solid. On hearing 

 this, I formed the idea that the animals which have these 

 horns change them like stags, and that their large horns fall 

 off and others grow in their place. I thought that this was, 

 without doubt, the reason that so many horns detached from 

 the head were brought by the floating ice of Greenland to 

 Iceland ; but when I saw the skull of which I have spoken 

 to you, and had duly examined the long root which was fixed 

 in the jaw, I could not help changing my opinion. Even 

 what M. le Grand Maitre told me, made me suppose that it 

 was a tooth and not a horn that he had sawn. It may be 

 that these teeth fall and are renewed in the case of these 

 fish, as they are in the case of children, and sometimes of 

 men ; and we often see that these teeth which fall are pushed 

 out and made to fall by other new teeth, which come before 

 the old have gone. A similar circumstance could not happen 



