178 THE NATURAL HISTORY REYIEW. 



food by devouring nearly everytMng animal tliat comes in their 

 way, still it is mainly to the seal that they owe the possibility 

 of existence. They have, in fact, been described " as singular 

 " composite beings, a link between Saxons and seals, hybrids, putting 

 " the seals' bodies into their own, and then encasing their skins in 

 " the seals' ; thus walking to and fro, a compound formation. A 

 " transverse section would discover them to be stratified, like a roly- 

 " poly pudding, only, instead of jam and paste, if their layers were 

 " noted on a perpendicular scale, they would range after this fashion, 

 " first of all seal, then biped, seal in the centre." 



Every part of the seal is eaten by the Esquimaux. Nothing 

 comes amiss to them, "We will spare our readers any description of 

 an Esquimaux dinner. In this respect Capt. Hall appears to have 

 become entirely one of themselves. He describes, almost usque ad 

 nauseam J the things which he ate, and ate even with pleasure. 

 " To say that I enjoyed this food," he tells us, "would only be to 

 ** repeat what I have before said, though no doubt many will feel 

 " surprised at my being able to eat, as I so frequently did, raw 



" meat ," and other things, the enumeration of which we will 



avoid. It is hardly necessary to state that the Esquimaux eat most 

 of their food in a raw state ; from this practice, indeed, their name is 

 derived — Tfshhe in the Chippeway language meaning raw, and 

 TTmwaUy he eats. One great reason for this, no doubt, consists in 

 the scarcity of fuel. In fact, the Esquimaux have no fires, in the 

 ordinary acceptation of the term, though each woman has a little 

 lamp of lapis ollaris, in which she burns seal-oil with a wick of moss, 

 and which she uses sometimes for cooking, but mainly to dry clothes 

 and to melt the snow in order to obtain water. In fact, the 

 Esquimaux in the north, like the Euegian in the south, has but little 

 idea of warming himself at a fire. In winter, the small snow igloo, 

 or hut, in which he lives, is so close that the difficulty is to keep it 

 cool, rather than to warm it. If the temperature is allowed to 

 rise too high, the hut melts away ; and the most trying time to 

 the Esquimaux is in the spring, when it is still too cold for tents, 

 and yet when the snow huts are giving way before the increasing 

 power of the sun. Of all the remarkable points connected with the 

 Esquimaux, the little use which they make of fire, and, surrounded as 

 they are with water in a solid form, the difficulty which they 

 experience in obtaining enough to drink, are perhaps the most 

 striking. Again, the analogies between the chemical actions which 



