THE NORTHERN LIMIT OF TREES. 20I 



there being seven buildings in all, including the unfin- 

 ished new chapel ; at a distance from the others was a 

 small powder-house. The servants in and about the sta- 

 tion were Eskimo, neat, cleanly, and intelligent. There 

 was plenty of lumber, judging by a pile of spruce-logs, 

 which were about fifty feet long and twenty inches in 

 thickness at the butt.* 



We were also told that the Eskimos had built and 

 manned a schooner of fifty tons. The mission is in part 

 a trading-post, but at present is paying only half its ex- 

 penses ; the missionaries dealing in, furs and curiosities, 

 which they sell in London. Mr. Weiz kindly gave me 

 a list of the plants and vertebrate animals of Labrador, 

 accompanied with notes, and his herbarium was very 

 complete in the plants of Okkak, which he said was 

 warmer, more protected, and had a more luxuriant flora 



* The northern limit of trees on the Labrador coast appears from the state- 

 ments of L. T. Reichel to be not far north of Hebron, as he says that while 

 the extreme northern part of the coast is treeless, the bays south of Hebron 

 are well wooded with spruce and larches, and south of this point with birches. 

 Although situated considerably more to the south than Greenland, the winter 

 is longer and the cold greater than in Greenland, since the southern extremity 

 of Greenland is warmed by a branch of the Gulf Stream, while the winter 

 climate of the Labrador coast is lowered by the floating ice borne by the 

 Labrador current from Baffin's Bay. In Greenland the water becomes open 

 in April, while in [Labrador the bays are not free from ice till the first of 

 July. On the other hand, the summer months are considerably warmer 

 than in Greenland, and hence there is a forest growth, since the interior of 

 Greenland is buried in ice. In Dewitz's pamphlet it is stated that in the deep 

 bays between Zoar and Hopedale birches occur, also willows, stunted bushes of 

 the mountain-ash, and alders, until south of Hopedale the vegetation passes 

 into the forest flora of Canada. But we observed that the outer islands are 

 nearly bare from Cape Harrison to Hopedale, the shrubs and stunted trees 

 mentioned only growing in protected valleys. Dewitz adds that there are rem- 

 nants of forests on the coast, but that the missionaries have been unable to 

 plant forests, and they think that the existing forest growth owes its origin to 

 an earlier, warmer period. 



