3/4 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



tribes, and are now found chiefly on the Arctic coast, where 

 whale, seal, and reindeer are the staple food 1 . 



Reference has already been made to the variable character 

 of the people of East Greenland, where the only known group at 

 present are the Anmagsaliks. These derelicts, who have their 

 stations on the coast district over against Iceland, were visited 

 for the first time by the Danish expedition of 1884-5, an d at 

 that date comprised 413 souls distributed in eleven stations over 

 a tract of about 80 miles. Each station had but one house, and 

 one of these was as large as the Kashga, or " Council-house," 

 which is found in every Alaskan village. It accommodated 58 

 inmates, being 28 feet long, 15 wide, and 6^ high, and was 

 divided off into eight "stalls," varying in size with the number 

 of persons in each family. And here they lived all together 

 during the long Arctic winters, cooking, sleeping, working, 

 merrymaking, dancing, singing, perhaps gorging now and then, 

 but never wrangling. " No quarrel disturbs the peace, there is 

 no dispute about the use of the narrow space ; scolding, or even 

 unkind words are considered a misdemeanour 2 ," as indeed 

 amongst most Eskimo peoples. 



A marvellous linguistic phenomenon is presented by the 

 Eskimo language, which, despite its exceedingly 

 involved structure (see above), is spoken with 



Eskimo surprising uniformity from Bering Strait to East 



Greenland. It is as if the Aryan mother tongue 

 were still current in all its fulness, with but slight dialectic 

 variation, from Ceylon to Iceland. This persistence for thousands 

 of years in such an exceedingly extenuated domain is partly due 

 to the migrations ranging everywhere over previously uninhabited 

 regions, so that no disintegrating effects were produced by contact 

 with other tongues. The dialectic differences, which Rink calls 

 "comparatively insignificant," are no greater than between English 

 and broad Scotch. On several grounds Rink argues that the 

 language was fully developed, as we now know it, before the first 

 dispersion from the culture home. Thus the names of nearly all 



1 Op. dt. n. p. n6. 



2 Rink, I. p. 26. The language itself is said to contain not a single abusive 

 term, so that it is impossible to swear in Eskimo. 



