The Mineral Resources of Greenland. JUL 
or white color, is found around Godthaab, which is used by the Green- 
landers in making vessels and bowls. At inter-settlement gatherings of 
Eskimos, such utensils were one of the principal articles of exchange, 
for only certain villages had the raw material, and at no point does 
the supply appear to have been particularly large. It is reported that 
in instances journeys lasting years were made to obtain good material. 
Each family had one or two vessels, which, as they had a life of 20 
or 30 years, were handed down as much prized heirlooms, for, with 
the crude implements available, both the quarrying and the shaping 
of the stone were tedious processes. The manufacture of soapstone 
cooking utensils began to wane on the West Coast early in the Nine- 
teenth Century and today, due to the decreasing supply of soapstone 
and the increasing cheapness of European wares, it is now fashioned 
only into paper weights, statuettes of kayakmen, and other trinkets 
to be sold to the white men. On the East Coast, however, as late as 
1884, (Meddel. om Grønland, Vol. IX, p. 256) natives still quarried 
soapstone and made it into cooking pots and lamps. The stone so 
employed is for the most part a massive form of talc, but, in part, pro- 
bably serpentine. It is evidently usually a metamorphic form of basic 
igneous rock, altered at comparatively slight depth. Basalt slabs from 
Disco Island were also hollowed into lamps. 
The use of asbestos by the Eskimo appears to antedate the arrival 
of the white man, for Davin Crantz (“The History of Greenland”, 
London, 1767; translation of original edition of 1765, p. 56), a Moravian 
missionary, after stating that it is found “in plenty in many hills of 
this country,” mentions its use in Europe for weaving fabrics and con- 
tinues — "But we must not imagine that the Greenlanders have so 
much invention. They use it dipped in train (for as long as the stone 
is oily it burns without consuming) only instead of a match or chips 
to light their lamps and keep them in order.” Asbestos was also used 
as wick trimmers. Because of its rarity, asbestos articles were passed 
from generation to generation. 
Admiral PEARY states that on the north point of Wolstenholm 
Sound (“Northward over the Great Ice, Robert E. Peary, New York, 
1898, Vol. II, p.136) he was guided to the site of a pyrite deposit “which 
the natives have used for steel in obtaining fire.” 
The ancient Eskimo fashioned chalcedony, rock crystal, agate and 
green jasper and flinty contact-metamorphic shale from the basalt 
region of Disco Island into arrowheads, skin scrapers, knives, etc. These, 
and the chips formed in their making, are common in Greenland kitchen- 
middens, and their wide distribution indicates an extensive coastal 
trade in various kinds of quartz. 
Two kinds of iron knives have been found in ancient Eskimos’ 
