Note 77 — PRE-COLUMBIAN DISCOVERY.

The facts that they engaged in hunting, and that they built a cabin to live in, might at first lead some to suppose that the place contained a forest or more or less trees, to supply wood. Yet this does not follow, as drift wood might supply all their wants for building purposes, where they could not obtain or use stone. Regarding drift wood, Crantz says, in speaking of Greenland: "For as He has denied this frigid, rocky region the growth of trees, He has bid the storms of the ocean to convey to its shores a great deal of wood, which accordingly comes floating thither, part without ice, but the most part along with it, and lodges itself between the islands. Were it not for this, we Europeans should have no wood to burn there.... Among this wood are great trees torn up by the roots, which by driving up and down for many years, and dashing and rubbing on the ice, are quite bare of branches. A small part of this drift wood are willows, alder and birch trees, which come out of the bays in the south; also large trunks of aspen trees, ... but the greatest part is pine and fir. We find also, a good deal of a sort of wood, finely veined, and with few branches; this, I fancy, is larchwood.... There is also a solid, reddish wood of a more agreeable fragrancy than the common fir, with visible cross veins, which I take to be the same species as the beautiful silver firs, or zirbel, that have the smell of cedar, and grow on the high Grison hills, and the Switzers wainscot their rooms with them."—History of Greenland, vol. i, p. 37.