10 Sypney H. BALL: 
common over a hugh area centering in Søndre Strömfiord, and over а 
smaller area centering in Atanek fiord. Some of the more fractured 
pyritiferous zones have, since glacial times, developed limonitized out- 
crops but at no place is this worthy of the name “gossan”’. As in Bohemia 
and Pennsylvania, zones of granite gneiss impregnated with pyrite 
crystals and graphite flakes have, however, developed a heavy although 
surficial limonite-stained outcrop. These graphitic deposits, marked by 
bare, reddish or brownish-yellow rounded ridges, surmounted by jagged 
boulders, are conspicuous from a distance. Soluble minerals, such as 
gypsum, melanterite, carphosiderite and pickeringite, are by no means, 
as we are apt loosely to think, confined to arid regions, all being reported 
from Greenland. | 
The climatic element, then, in the alteration of ore deposits is 
one of degree and not of kind. Doubtless, oxidation, owing to the low 
average temperature of the groundwaters and their frequent inert con- 
dition through being frozen, is less rapid than in temperate climates, 
and glaciation, especially in the bottom of the valleys, has been parti- 
cularly intense. Likewise, although sulphates and other soluble minerals 
are reported, they are as much mineralogic curiosities as they would 
be in the humid basin of the Congo. 
Use of minerals by Eskimos. 
The Eskimo is a keen-eyed observer, who gathers numerous minerals 
for use or as curiosities. To the visitor the women and children shyly 
disclose, in a partially opened hand, a bright pebble of supposedly great 
value, and the men are willing, for a modest consideration, to dispose 
of an embryonic geological museum. The Eskimo language has names, 
not only for all the commoner, but also for the more striking minerals. 
The keenness of observation of the Eskimo, who has traversed in search 
of game almost all of the land free of ice, together with the comparatively 
bare condition of much of the country rock, makes the finding of im- 
portant ore bodies less likely than is usual in a country only partially 
explored by white men. 
In ancient Eskimo tombs are found cooking pots, lamps and other 
household utensils, and, in instances, crude manikins, all carved from 
soft, tough, greenish or whitish soapstone-like minerals. 
Iver Bory (or BAARDSEN, 1341 A. D.) mentions the use by Eskimos 
for pots and “other great vessels” of a stone “that fire cannot hurt”, 
(Purchas — his Pilgrims Vol. XIII, “A Treatise of Iver Вофу”, trans- 
lated out of the Norse language into High Dutch in the year 1560 and 
out of High Dutch into Low Dutch — р. 166, and 168). Hans EGEDE 
(“A Description of Greenland, 1818”), writing early in the eighteenth 
century, says that a sort of coarse “bastard marble” of blue-green, red 
