of driftwood. Natives cross and recross Bering straits to-day on the ice and in primitive skin canoes, not unlike Cape Cod dories, which have not been improved in construction since the days of prehistoric man. Indeed, the primitive man may be seen at East cape almost as he was thousands of years ago. Evolution and development, with the exception of firearms, seem to have halted at East cape. The place, with its cave-like dwellings and skin-clad inhabitants, among whom the presence of white men creates the same excitement as the advent of a circus among the colored population of Washington, makes one fancy that he is in some grand prehistoric museum, and that he has gone backward in time several thousand years in order to get there.

While we may do something towards tracing the effects of physical agents on the Eskimo back into the darkness that antedates history, yet his geographical origin and his antiquity are things concerning which we know but little. Being subjects of first-class interest, deserving of grave study and so vast in themselves, they cannot be touched upon here except incidentally. Attempting to study them is like following the labyrinthal ice mazes of the Arctic in quest of the North Pole.

We may, however, venture the assertion that the Eskimo is of autocthonic origin in Asia, but is not autocthonous in America. His arrival there and subsequent migrations are beyond the reach of history or tradition. Others, though, contend from the analogy of some of the western tribes of Brazil, who are identical in feature to the Chinese, that the Eskimo may have come from South America; and the fashion of wearing labrets, which is common to the indigenous population both of Chili and Alaska, has been cited as a further proof.

Touching the subject of early migrations, Mr. Charles Wolcott Brooks, whose sources of information at command have been exceptionally good, reports in a paper to the California Academy of Sciences a record of sixty Japanese junks which were blown off the coast and by the influence of the Kuro-Shiwo were drifted or stranded on the coast of North America, or on the Hawaiian or adjacent islands. As merchant ships and ships of war are known to have been built in Japan prior to the Christian era, a great number of disabled junks containing small parties of Japanese must have been stranded on the Aleutian islands and on the Alaskan coast in past centuries, thereby furnishing evidence of a constant infusion of Japanese blood among the coast tribes.

Leaving aside any attempt to show the ethnical relations of these facts, the question naturally occurs whether any of these waifs ever found their way back from the American coast. On observing the course of the great circle of the Kuro-Shiwo and the course of the trade winds, one inclines to the belief that such a thing is not beyond the range of possibility. Indeed, several well-authenticated instances are mentioned by Mr. Brooks; and in connection with the subject he advances a further hypothesis, namely, the American origin of the Chinese race, and shows in a plausible way that—

If America be the oldest continent, paleontologically speaking, as Agassiz tells us, there appears to be some reason for looking to it as the spot where early traces of the race are to be found, and the fact would seem to warrant further study and investigation in connection with the indigenous people of our continent, thereby awakening new sources of inquiry among ethnologists.

LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES.

The sienite plummet from San Joaquin Valley, California, goes back to the distant age of the Drift; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is older than the relics or stone implements from the drift gravel and the European caves.

It is doubtful, though, whether these data enable us to make generalizations equal in value to those afforded by the study of vocabularies. It is alleged that linguistic affinities exist between some of the tribes of the American coast and our Oriental neighbors across the Pacific. Mr. Brooks, whom I have already quoted, reports that in March, 1860, he took an Indian boy on board the Japanese steam corvette Kanrin-maru, where a comparison of Coast-Indian and pure Japanese was made at his request by Funkuzawa Ukitchy, then Admiral's secretary; the result of which he prepared for the press and published with a view to suggesting further linguistic investigations. He says that quite an infusion of Japanese words is found among some of the Coast tribes of Oregon and California, either pure or clipped, along with some very peculiar Japanese "idioms, constructions, honorific, separative, and agglutinative particles"; that shipwrecked Japanese are invariably enabled to communicate understandingly with the Coast Indians, although speaking quite a different language, and that many shipwrecked Japanese have informed him that they were enabled to communicate with and understand the natives of Atka and Adakh islands of the Aleutian group.

With a view to finding out whether any linguistic affinity existed between Japanese and the Eskimo dialects in the vicinity of Bering straits, I caused several Japanese boys, employed as servants on board the Corwin, to talk on numerous occasions to the natives both of the American and Asiatic coasts; but in every instance they were unable to understand the Eskimo, and assured me that they could not detect a single word that bore any resemblance to words in their own language.

The study of the linguistic peculiarities which distinguish the population around Bering straits offers an untrodden path in a new field; but it is doubtful whether the results, except to linguists like Cardinal Mezzofanti, or philologists of the Max Müller type, would be at all commensurate with the efforts expended in this direction, since it is asserted that the human voice is incapable of articulating more than twenty distinct sounds, therefore whatever resemblances there may be in the particular words of different languages are of no ethnic value. Although these may be the views of many persons not only in regard to the Eskimo tongue but in regard to philology in general, the matter has a wonderful fascination for more speculative minds.

Much has been said about the affinity of language among the Eskimo—some asserting that it is such as to allow mutual intercourse everywhere—but instances warrant us in concluding that considerable deviations exist in their vocabularies, if not in the grammatical construction. For instance, take two words that one hears oftener than any others: On the Alaska coast they say "na-koo-ruk," a word meaning "good," "all right," etc.; on the Siberian coast "mah-zink-ah," while a vocabulary collected during Lieutenant Schwatka's expedition gives the word "mah-muk'-poo" for "good." The first two of these words are so characteristic of the tribes on the respective shores above the straits that a better designation than any yet given to them by writers on the subject would be Nakoorooks for the people on the American side and Mazinkahs for those on the Siberian coast. These names, by which they know each other, are in general use among the whalemen and