220 PREHISTORIC FISHING. 



of bones a flat stone was found, so large as to require the united efforts of several 

 Greenlanders to turn it. They declared that the workshop for the fabrication of 

 stone instruments must have been situated on that spot, and expected accordingly 

 to find a great quantity of chips in its vicinity, which, however, the result of 

 their searches did not confirm. 



" The kitchen-midden outside the large cot rested on a low slab of gneiss, 

 separated from it by a thin layer of turf, in which was no trace of any piece 

 of bone, and which had therefore been formed before the place was inhabited. 

 In other respects this turf, of which specimens were taken away, was perfectly 

 like the earth which was mixed with bones and stone chips. Here there were 

 no Mytilus-shells, though these are everywhere else found around Greenland 

 dwellings : an indication that formerly the inhabitants were not obliged to have 

 recourse to this species of famine-food. 



" To discover the various animal forms that had here been the prey of the 

 hunter, Dr. Oberg collected a quantity of bones, in which work the Greenlanders 

 took a lively interest, usually determining with great certainty the species to 

 which the pieces of bone had belonged. 



" The following species could be ascertained: Cervus tarandus, Ursus mari- 

 timus, Trichechus rosmarus, Cystophora cristata, Phoca barbata, Phoca grcenlandica, 

 PJioca hispida, Phoca vitulina, Delphinapterus leucas. 



"Even if we suppose that this spot was first inhabited shortly after the 

 Eskimos entered Greenland by Smith's Sound, its age will be scarcely more than 

 five hundred years, a period generally too short to show marks of the slow but 

 continuous changes to which the organic world is subjected. Neither do the 

 kitchen-middens of Kaja* contain any other forms of animals than those still 

 living on the coast .of Greenland. Nevertheless we obtain here an interesting 

 confirmation of the changes that the ice-fjord has undergone. The walrus, Phoca 

 barbata, and Cystophora cristata no longer venture into this long ice-blockaded 

 fjord ; and even the bear has now become so scarce in the colonies of North 

 Greenland south of the Waigat that most of the Danes resident in those parts 

 have never seen it. The remnants of bones in the kitchen-middens, on the other 

 hand, prove that these animals were abundant there formerly, and are conse- 

 quently an evidence that the fjord at Jakobshavn was less filled with ice than 

 now."f 



Dr. Emil Bessels makes the following statements concerning the formation 

 of refuse-heaps in Greenland : 



* Name of the place. 



j- Nordenskiold : Account of an Expedition to Greenland in the year 1870 ; Manual of the Natural History, 

 Geology, and Physics of Greenland and the Neighboring Regions, etc.; edited by Professor T. Rupert Jones; 

 London, 1875 ; p. 412, etc. 



