42 CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 
If the foregoing means for estimating the mental grasp and capacity for improvement be 
correct, then we must accord to the most northern nation of the globe a fair degree of brain 
energy—potential though it be. Aside from the mere physical methods of determining the degree 
of intelligence it is urged by some writers, ameng them the historian Robertson, that tact in 
commerce and correct ideas of property are evidence of a considerable progress toward civilization. 
The natural inference from this is that they are tests of intellectual power, since mind is a combi- 
nation of all the actual and possible states of consciousness of the organism, and an examination 
of the Eskimo system of trade draws its own conclusion. Their fondness for trade has been known 
for a long time, as well as the extended range of their commercial intercourse. They trade with 
the Indians, with the fur companies, the whalers, and among themselves across Bering Straits. 
Many of them are veritable Shylocks, having a thorough comprehension of the axiom in political 
economy regarding the regulation of the price of a thing by the demand. 
THE MORAL SENSE AND THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT. 
With the aptitudes and instincts of our common humanity Eskimo morals, as manifested in 
truth, right, and virtue, also admit of remark. Except where these people have had the bad 
example of the white man, whose vices they have imitated not on account of defective moral nature 
but because they saw few or no virtues, they are models of truthfulness and honesty. In fact 
their virtues in this respect are something phenomenal. The same cannot be said, however, for 
their sexual morals, which as a rule are the contrary of good. Even a short stay among the 
hyperboreans causes one to smile at Lord Kames’s * frigidity of the North Americans” and at the 
fallacy of Herder who says, “ the blood of man near the pole circulates but slowly, the heart beats 
but languidly ; consequently the married live chastely, the women alinost require compulsion to 
take upon them the troubles of a married life,” &c. Nearly the same idea, expressed by Montes- 
quieu, and repeated by Byron in “happy the nations of the moral north,” are statements so at 
variance with our experience that this fact must alone excuse a reference to the subject. So far 
are they from applying to the people in question, that it is only necessary to mention, without 
going into detail, that the women are freely offered to strangers by way of hospitality, showing a 
decided preference for white men, whom they believe to beget better offspring than their own 
men. In this connection one is soon convinced that salacious and prurient tastes are not the 
exclusive privilege of people living outside of the Arctic Circle; and observation favors the belief 
in the existence of pederasty among Eskimo, if one may be allowed to judge from circumstances, 
which it is not necessary to particularize, and from a word in their language signifying the act. 
Since morality is the last virtue acquired by man and the first one he is likely to lose, it is 
not so surprising to find outrages on morals among the undeveloped inhabitants of the north as it 
is to find them in intelligent Christian communities among people whose moral sense ought to be 
far above that of the average primitive man in view of their associations and the variations that 
have been so frequently repeated and accumulated by heredity ; and where there is no hierarchy 
nor established missionaries it is still more surprising to find any moral sense at all among a 
people whose vague religious belief does not extend beyond Shamanism or Animism, which to them 
explains the more strange and striking natural phenomena by the hypothesis of direct spiritual 
agency. 
It must not be understood by this, however, that these people have no religion, as many 
travellers have erroneously believed; that would be almost equivalent to stating that races of 
men exist without speech, memory, or knowledge of fire. A purely ethnological view of religion 
which regards it as “the feeling which falls upon man in the presence of the unknown,” favors 
the idea that the children of the icy north have many of the same feelings in this respect as those 
experienced by ourselves under similar conditions, although there is doubtless a change in us 
produced by more advanced thought and nicer feeling. On the other hand, how many habits and 
ideas that are senseless and perfectly unexplainable by the light of our present modes of life and 
thought can be explained by similar customs and prejudices existing among these distant tribes. 
Is there no fragment of primitive superstition or residue of bygone ages in the supposed influence 
of the Evil Eye” in Ireland, or in the habit of ‘* telling the bees” in Germany? Is there not 
something of intellectual fossildom in the popular notion about Friday and thirteen at table, and 
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