much to be regretted that some of them cannot be bottled up in a phonograph and sent to a musical composer. On the coast of Siberia I heard an Eskimo boy sing correctly a song he had learned while on board a whaling vessel, and on several of the Aleutian islands the natives play the accordeon quite well; have music-boxes, and even whistle strains from "Pinafore."

From music to dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the latter be regarded in a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the opposite sex or as the expression of joyous excitement. This manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam and David indulged in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and which old Homer says is the sweetest and most perfect of human enjoyments, is a pastime much in vogue among the Eskimo, and it required but little provocation to start a dance at any time on the Corwin's decks when a party happened to be on board. The dancing, however, had not the cadence of "a wave of the sea," nor was there the harmony of double rotation circling in a series of graceful curves to strains like those of Strauss or Gungl. On the contrary, there was something saltatorial and jerky about all the dancing I saw both among the men and women. It is the custom at some of their gatherings, after the hunting season is over, for the men to indulge in a kind of terpsichorean performance, at the same time relating in Homeric style the heroic deeds they have done. At other times the women do all the dancing. Being stripped to the waist they are more décolleté than our beauties at the German, and the men take the part of spectators only in this choreographical performance.

ART INSTINCT.

The aptitude shown by Eskimo in carving and drawing has been noticed by all travellers among them. Some I have met with show a degree of intelligence and appreciation in regard to charts and pictures scarcely to be expected from such a source. From walrus ivory they sculpture figures of birds, quadrupeds, marine animals, and even the human form, which display considerable individuality notwithstanding their crude delineation and imperfect detail. I have also seen a fair carving of a whale in plumbago. Evidences of decoration are sometimes seen on their canoes, on which are found rude pictures of walruses, etc., and they have a kind of picture-writing, by means of which they commemorate certain events in their lives, just as Sitting Bull has done in an autobiography that may be seen at the Army Medical Museum.

When we were searching for the missing whalers off the Siberian coast, some natives were come across with whom we were unable to communicate except by signs, and wishing to let them know the object of our visit, a ship was drawn in a note-book and shown to them, with accompanying gesticulations, which they quickly comprehended, and one fellow, taking the pencil and note-book, drew correctly a pair of reindeer horns on the ship's jib-boom—a fact which identified, beyond doubt, the derelict vessel they had seen. At Point Hope an Eskimo, who had allowed us to take sketches of him, desired to sketch one of the party, and taking one of our note-books and a pencil, neither of which he ever had in his hand before, produced the accompanying likeness of Professor Muir:

At Saint Michael's there is an Eskimo boy who draws remarkably well, having taught himself by copying from the Illustrated London News. He made a correct pen-and-ink drawing of the Corwin, and another of the group of buildings at Saint Michael's, which, though creditable in many respects, had the defect of many Chinese pictures, being faulty in perspective. As these drawings equal those in Dr. Rink's book, done by Greenland artists, I regret my inability to reproduce them here. As evidences of culture they show more advancement than the carvings of English rustics that a clergyman has caused to be placed on exhibition at the Kensington Museum.

Sir John Ross speaks highly of his interpreter as an artist; Beechy says that the knowledge of the coast obtained by him from Innuit maps was of the greatest value, while Hall and others show their geographical knowledge to be as perfect as that possible of attainment by civilized men unaided by instruments. I had frequent opportunities to observe these Eskimo ideas of chartography. They not only understood reading a chart of the coast when showed to them, but would make tracings of the unexplored part, as I knew a native to do in the case of an Alaskan river, the mouth only of which was laid down on our chart.

Manifestation of the plastic art, which is found among tribes less intelligent, is rare among the Eskimo. In fact, the only thing of the kind seen was some rude pottery at Saint Lawrence island, the design of which showed but crude development of ornamental ideas. The same state of advancement was shown in some drinking cups carved from mammoth ivory and a dipper made from the horn of a mountain sheep.

COMBATIVENESS.

In one of the acts of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages" the Eskimo plays a very unimportant rôle. Perhaps in no other race is the combative instinct less predominant; in none is quarrelling, fierceness of disposition, and jealousy more conspicuously absent, and in none does the desire for the factitious renown of war exist in a more rudimentary and undeveloped state. Perhaps the constant fight with cold and hunger is a compensation which must account for the absence of such unmitigated evils as war, taxes, complex social organization and hierarchy among the curious people of the icy north. The pursuits of peace and of simple patriarchal lives, notwithstanding the fact of much in connection therewith that is wretched, and forbidding to a civilized man, seem to beget in these people a degree of domestic tranquility and contentment which, united to their light-hearted and cheery disposition, is an additional reason for believing the sum of human happiness to be constant throughout the world.

MENTAL CHARACTER AND CAPACITY.

The intellectual character of the Eskimo, judging from the information which various travellers have furnished, as well as my personal knowledge, produces more than a feeble belief in the possibility of their being equal to anything they choose to take an interest in learning. The Eskimo is not "muffled imbecility," as some one has called him, nor is he dull and slow of understanding, as Vitruvius describes the northern nation to be "from breathing a thick air"—which, by the way, is thin, elastic and highly ozonized—nor is he, according to Dr. Beke, "degenerated almost to the lowest state compatible with the retention of rational endowments." On the contrary, the old Greenland missionary, Hans Egede, writes: "I have found some of them witty enough and of good capacity;" Sir Martin Frobisher says they are "in nature very subtle and sharp-witted;" Sir Edward Parry, while extolling their honesty and good nature, adds, "Indeed, it required no long acquaintance to convince us that art and education might easily have made them equal or superior to ourselves;" Sauer tells of a woman who learned to speak Russian fluently in rather less than twelve months, and Beechy and others have acknowledged the intelligent help they have received from Eskimo in making their explorations.

Before going further, it may not be amiss to speak in a general way of the bony covering which protects the organ whose function it is to