Whether or no this be the same sort of sand as that of which Sir Martin Frobisher is said to have brought some hundred tons to England, and was pretended to contain a great deal of gold; and again (as we have above taken notice of) of which some of the Danish Greenland Company’s ships returned freighted to Copenhagen in the year 1636, is a question which I have no mind to decide. However, thus much I can say, that by the small experience I have acquired in the art of chemistry, I have tried both by extraction and precipitation if it would yield any thing, but always lost my labour. After all I declare, I never could find any other sort of sand that contained either gold or silver. But as for rock crystal, both red and white, you find it here: the red contains some particular solis, which can only be produced by the spagyric art. Stone flax, or what they call asbestos, is so common here, that you may see whole mountains of it: it has the appearance of a common stone, but can be split or cloven like a piece of wood. It contains long filaments, which, when beaten and separated from the dross, you may twist and spin into a thread. As long as it has its oily moisture it will burn without being consumed to ashes. Round about our colony of Good Hope there is a sort of coarse bastard marble of different colours, blue, green, red, and some quite white, and again some white with black spots, which the natives form into all sorts of vessels and utensils, as lamps, pots to boil in, and even crucibles to melt metals in, this marble standing proof against the fire[25]. Of this marble there was brought a quantity over to Drontheim in Norway, which they made use of in the adorning of the cathedral of that city, as we have it from Peter Claudius Undalin[26]. Amongst the produce of the sea, besides different shells, muscles, and periwinkles, there are also coral trees, of which I have seen one of a fine form and size. CHAP. IV _Of the Nature of the Climate, and the Temperament of the Air._ The natives of Greenland have no reason to complain of rains and stormy weather, which seldom trouble them; especially in the Bay of Disco, in the 68th degree of Latitude, where they commonly have clear and settled weather during the whole summer season: but again, when foul and stormy weather falls in, it rages with an incredible fierceness and violence, chiefly when the wind comes about Southerly, or South West; and the storm is laid and succeeded by fair weather as soon as the wind shifts about to the West and North.