II.] OLD ACCOUNTS OF THE SAMOYEDS 81 



one another. Which they make more probable, because at 

 this time they eate all kind of raw flesh, whatsoeuer it bee, 

 euen the very carrion that lyeth in the ditch. But as the 

 Samoits themselves will say, they were called Samoie, that is, 

 of themselves, as tliough they were Indigcnoi, or people bred 

 upon that very soyle that never changed their seate from one 

 place to another, as most Nations have done. They are clad 

 in Seale-skinnes, with the hayrie side outwards downe as low 

 as the knees, with their Breeches and Netherstocks of the 

 same, both men and women. They are all Blacke hayr'ed, 

 naturally beardless. And therefore the Men are hardly dis- 

 cerned from the Women by their lookes : saue that the Women 

 weare a locke of hayre down along both their eares." 



In nearly the same way the Samoyeds are described by 

 G. De Veer in his account of Barents' second voyage in 1595. 

 Barents got good information from the Samoyeds as to the 

 navigable water to the eastward, and always stood on a good 

 footing with them, excepting on one occasion when the 

 Samoyeds went down to the Dutchmen's boats and took back 

 an idol which had been carried off from a large sacrificial 

 mound. 



The Samoyeds have since formed the subject of a very 

 extensive literature, of which however it is impossible for 

 me to give any account here. Among other points their 

 relations to other races have been much discussed. On this 

 subject I have received from my learned friend, the renowned 

 philologist Professor Ahlquist of Helsingfors the following 

 communication : — 



The Samoyeds are reckoned, along with the Tungoose, the 

 Mongolian, the Turkish and the Finnish -Ugrian races, to belong 

 to the so-called Altaic or Ural-Altaic stem. What is mainly 

 characteristic of this stem, is that all the languages occurring 

 within it belong to the so-called agglutinating type. For in 

 these languages the relations of ideas are expressed exclusively 

 by terminations or suffixes — inflections, prefixes and pre- 

 positions, as expressive of relations, being completely unknown 

 to them. Other peculiarities characteristic of the Altaic 

 languages are the vocal harmony occurring in many of them, 

 the inability to have more than one consonant in the beginning 

 of a word, and the expression of the plural by a peculiar affix, 

 the case terminations being the same in the plural as in the 

 singular. The affinity between the different branches of the 

 Altaic stem is thus founded mainly on analogy or resemblance 

 in the construction of the languages, while the different tongues 

 in the material of language (both in the words themselves 

 and in the expression of relations) show a very limited affinity 



G 



