Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/611

Rh Our knowledge of the Esquimaux is far from complete. They call themselves Innuit, not Esquimaux, and the name signifies the people. Although divided into tribes and smaller companies, they are very uniform in their physical appearance and customs. A tribe met with by Sir John Ross about 77° north latitude believed themselves to be not only the only Esquimaux, but the only people in the world. As their numbers are comparatively small, and they have a total range of about 5,000 miles of coast-line, it is evident how a tribe might exist for centuries without meeting any competitors for seal and bear meat in its range. The different tribes practise a sort of communism with regard to their possessions. Different families dwell together in one house, and rely upon each other for mutual support. So much, in brief, we may say here of this people. With regard to their affinities, they are from their speech a branch of the Turanian family, and allied to the Hungarian, Turkish, Lapp, and Basque races. As to their habits, while their morals seem to be good, they are most voracious eaters, from the fact that they cannot always depend on their supply of food, and so gorge themselves when they get a quantity. Parry tells of an Esquimaux boy who ate eight and a half pounds of seal-meat, one and a half pound of bread, one and a half pint of soup, and drank three wineglasses of gin, a tumbler of hot whiskey-and-water, and five pints of water, consuming the whole, between intervals of rest, in one day. They seldom wash except in summer, in which I think they are excusable to some degree, in the absence of proper heating apparatus in their huts.

As usual, travelers and scientists speak badly of boys. It is always the boys who are doing the worst actions, be they Esquimaux or New-Englanders. While I myself, in the present lecture, am guilty of this unavoidable presentation of the facts, I yet believe that the most of the wrongs of this world are committed by grownup persons, and I look to the growing generation of boys to make better and wiser men than their fathers. They have the benefit of a greater amount of experimental information stored up for them in books from which they can take fresh departures in knowledge and happiness.

It has been my aim in the present lecture to give you the result of latest information on the earlier man of North America, and at the same time to indicate some of the different branches of science which it is necessary for us to pursue in order to understand anthropology or the study of man. We have called upon geology to describe the strata in which we find the relics of man, and to explain their probable age and the manner of their deposition. Archæology has shown the progress from the simple to the complex in the various implements used by man, and has classified them. Ethnology has allowed us to discriminate between the different races of mankind, to study their habits and migrations, and classify their religions. Biology has enabled us