38 CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 
Eskimo In fact, the only thing of the kind seen was some rude pottery at Saint Lawrence Island, 
the design of which showed but crude development of ornamental ideas. The same state of 
advancement was shown in some drinking cups carved from mammoth ivory and a dipper made 
from the horn of a mountain sheep. 
COMBATIVENESS. 
In one of the acts of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages the Eskimo plays a very unimportant role. 
Perhaps in no other race is the combative instinct less predominant; in none is quarreling, fierce- 
ness of disposition, and jealousy more conspicuously absent, and in none does the desire for the 
factitious renown of war exist in a more rudimentary and undeveloped state. Perhaps the 
constant fight with cold and hunger is a compensation which must account for the absence of 
such unmitigated evils as war, taxes, complex social organization, and hierarchy among the 
curious people of the icy north. The pursuits of peace and of simple patriarchal lives, notwith- 
standing the fact that much in connection therewith is wretched and forbidding to a civilized 
man, seem to beget in these people a degree of domestic tranquillity and contentment which, 
united to their light-hearted and cheery disposition, is an additional reason for believing the sum 
of human happiness to be constant throughout the world. 
MENTAL CHARACTER AND CAPACITY. 
The intellectual character of the Eskimo, judging from the information which various travellers 
have furnished, as well as my personal knowledge, produces more than a feeble belief in the 
possibility of their being equal to anything they choose to take an interest in learning. The Eskimo 
is not **muffled imbecility,” as some one has called him, nor is he dull and slow of understanding, 
as Vitruvius describes the northern nation to be “from breathing a thick air”—which, by the 
way, is thin, elastic, and highly ozonized—nor is he, according to Dr. Beke, ‘degenerated almost 
to the lowest state compatible with the retention of rational endowments.” On the contrary, the 
old Greenland missionary, Hans Egede, writes: ‘I have found some of them witty enough and of 
good capacity ;” Sir Martin Frobisher says they are ‘in nature very subtle and sharp-witted ;” 
Sir Edward Parry, while extolling their honesty and good nature, adds, “Indeed, it required no 
long acquaintance to convince us that art and education might easily have made them equal or 
superior to ourselves ;” Sauer tells of a woman who learned to speak Russian fluently in rather 
less than twelve months, and Beechy and others have acknowledged the intelligent help they 
have received from Eskimo in making their explorations. 
Betore going further, it may not be amiss to speak in a general way of the bony covering which 
protects the organ whose function it is to generate the vibrations known as thought. Of one 
hundred crania, collected principally at Saint Lawrence Island, a number were examined by me at 
the Army Medical Museum, through the courtesy of Dr. Huntington, with the result of changing 
and greatly modifying some of the previous notions of the conventional Eskimo skull as acquired 
from books on eraniology. Perhaps after the inspection and examination of a large collection of 
crania it may be safe to pronounce upon their differential character; but whether the differences in 
configuration are constant or only occasional manifestations admits of as much doubt as the 
exceptions in Professor Sophocles’s Greek graminar, which are often coextensive with the rule.* 
The typical Eskimo skull, according to popular notion, is one exhibiting a low order of intelli- 
gence, and characterized by small brain capacity, with great prominence of the superciliary ridges, 
occipital protuberance, and zygomatic arches, the latter projecting beyond the general contour of 
the skull like the handles of a jar or a peach basket ; and lines drawn from the most projecting 
part of the arches and touching the sides of the frontal bone are supposed to meet over the forehead, 
forming a triangle, for which reason the skull is known as pyramidal. 
The first specimen, examined from a vertical view, shows something of the typical character 
as figured in A, and when viewed posteriorly there is noticed a flattening of the parietal walls with 
an elongated vertex as shown in D; while a second specimen, represented by B, shows none of the 
foregoing characteristics, the form being elongated and the parietal walls so far overhanging as to 
conceal the zygomatic arches in the vertical view, so that if lines be drawn as previously men- 
*See Retzius, Finska Kranier, Stockholm: 1878. 
