36 @RUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 
outlandish attempt at adornment was witnessed at Cape Blossom in a woman who wore a 
bunch of colored beads suspended from the septum of her nose. These habits, however, hardly 
seem so revolting as the use of the labret by the “Mazinka” men on the American coast, of 
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Style of personal ornamentation adopted by the women of Saint Lawrence Island. 
whom it is related that a sailor seeing one of them for the first time, and observing the slit in the 
lower lip through which the native thrust his tongue, thought he had discovered a man with two 
mouths. The use of the labret, like many of the attempts at primitive ornamentation, is very 
old, it having been traced by Dall along the American Coast from the lower part of Chili to 
Alaska. Persons fond of tracing vestiges of savage ornamentation amid intellectual advancement 
and iesthetic sensibility far in advance of the primitive man, may observe in the wearers of 
bangles and ear-rings the same tendency existing in a differentiated form. 
DIVERSIONS. 
I doubt whether Shakespeare’s dictum in regard to music holds good when applied to the 
Eskimo, for they have but little music in their souls, and among no people is there such a notice- 
able absence of “treason, stratagem, and spoil.” A rude drum and a monotonous chant consisting 
only of the fundamental note and minor third, are the only things in the way of music among the 
more remote settlements of which I have any knowledge. Mays. Micawber’s singing has been 
described as the table-beer of acoustics. Eskimo singing issomething more. The beer has become 
flat by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler, experimented on his 
instrument with a view to see what effect music would have on the ‘savage breast,” but his 
best efforts at rendering Madame Angot and the Grande Duchesse were wasted before an unsym- 
pathetic audience, who showed as little appreciation of his performance as some people do when 
listening to Wagner's “ Music of the Future.” 
Where they have come in contact with civilization, their musical taste is more developed, At 
Saint Michael’s I was told that some of their songs are so characteristic that it is much to be 
regretted that some of them cannot be bottled up in a phonograph and sent to a musical composer. 
