ALIMENT. 321 



how recently they have passed. This cropping is done by the 

 animal without stopping to feed, but as it walks along. They 

 take the various kinds of grasses found in their range freely, 

 though I lack the evidence to show that they are as fond of 

 aquatic vegetation as is the moose. After all, their great re- 

 source is the reindeer moss, which, in many places, buixlens the 

 grouud to great depths, sometimes even two or three feet, where 

 scarcely any other vegetation can survive. 



Of the Woodland Caribou, Captain Hardy says : " The 

 Caribou feeds principally on the Oladonia rangiferina, with 

 which barrens and all permanent clearings in the fir forests are 

 thickly carpeted, and which appears to grow more luxuriantly in 

 the sub-arctic regions than in more temperate latitudes. Mr. 

 Hind, in ' Explorations in Labrador,' describes the beauty and 

 luxuriance of this moss in the Laurentian country, ' with ad- 

 miration for which,' he says, ' the traveler is inspired, as well as 

 for its wonderful adaptation to the climate, and its value as a 

 source of food to the mainstay of the Indian, and consequently 

 of the fur trade in these regions, — the Caribou.^ The recently 

 announced discovery by a French chemist, who has succeeded in 

 extracting alcohol in large quantities from lichens, and especially 

 from the reindeer moss (identical in Europe with that of Amer- 

 ica), is interesting, and readily suggests the value of this prim- 

 itive vegetation, in supporting animal life in that boreal climate, 

 as a heat-producing food. Besides the above, which appears to be 

 its staple food, the Caribou partakes of the tripe de roche {Sticta 

 pulmonaria), and other parasitic lichens growing on the bark of 

 trees, and is exceedingly fond of the JJsnea which grows on the 

 boughs (especially affecting the tops) of the black spruce, in 

 long pendent hanks. In the forests on the Cumberland Hills, in 

 Nova Scotia, I have observed the snow quite trodden down during 

 the night by the Caribou, which had resorted to feed on the ' old 

 men's beards' in the tops of the spruces, felled by the lumberers 

 on the day previous. In the same locality, I have observed such 

 frequent scratchings in the first light snows of the season at the 

 foot of the trees in beech groves, that I am convinced that the 

 animal, like the bear, is partial to the rich food afforded by the 

 moss. I am not aware that the favorite item of the diet of the 

 Norwegian reindeer (^Ranuncidus glacialis) is found in America, 

 and the Woodland Caribou has no chance of exhibiting; the 



1 Mr. Hind describes the reindeer moss as covering the broken, rocky surface to 

 a great depth, and which, when burned off, they found almost impassable on foot. 

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