﻿LANGUAGE. 361 



interpreter Augustus, who was a native of the 

 shores of Sir Thomas Roe's Welcome, and having 

 resided at Churchill, had acquired the power of 

 expressing his meaning in very tolerable English. 

 The book containing the results of his labours and 

 mine was unfortunately stolen from me in the follow- 

 ing summer by the Eskimos of the estuary of the 

 Mackenzie ; but through the kindness of the Reve- 

 rend Peter Latrobe, the philanthropic secretary of 

 the Moravian Mission, I was provided for use on 

 the present expedition with an excellent grammar, 

 and a pretty full dictionary, formed by some of 

 the industrious missionaries of the Labrador coast. 

 By carefully perusing these volumes, together with 

 Captain Washington's extensive vocabulary, pub- 

 lished under sanction of the Admiralty in 1850, I 

 feel justified in maintaining the assertion I have 

 already made, that the Eskimo language does not 

 materially vary throughout a line of coast longer 

 than that which any other aboriginal people pos- 

 sesses. Many seeming discrepancies I have been 

 able to trace to the genius of the language, by 

 which the same object receives a distinct appellation 

 for every different aspect and condition which it 

 assumes ; and the formers of the vocabularies have 

 seldom given the precise translation such a language 

 requires. Thus a-nio signifies "the snow;" ap-ut, 

 " snow," a general name for snow on the ground, 



