18'J2-93.] NOTES ON THE WESTERN DENES. - 17 



A tribe of Atnas, Adenas, Atnahs or Ahthenas, whose habitat would 

 be the extreme north-west of this continent, is occasionally mentioned in 

 ethnographic literature as belonging to the great Dene family. Pilling 

 gives it a place in his " Bibliography of the Athapaskan Languages.'^ 

 There must be here a mistake either of name or of identification. 

 " Atna," etc., is a Den^ word which means " foreigner, heterogener," and 

 is used to qualify all aboriginal races which are 7wt Dene. Either then 

 the Atnas of the travellers and ethnographers are not Dene, or if they 

 belong to that race they must be misnamed. 



Main Characteristics of the D^n£ Race. 



If there is in the broad world a family of human beings which, though 

 a mere subdivision of a larger group of the genus homo, plainly demon- 

 strates, through the diversity of its many branches, the fallibility as 

 ethnic criteria of all but one of the various sciences which go to make 

 "^ up Ethnology, this is most certainly the Dene family. Savants now-a- 

 days seem too prone to study man as they would a mere animal. Per- 

 haps they overlook too easily the fact that he is a rational being. If 

 a part of the animal kingdom, he is there a king without peer ; and to 

 judge him after the same standard as we do the brutes of creation should 

 be considered unscientific. We hear constantly of bodily measure- 

 ments, of anthropometry and craniology. Now, without entering into 

 the technicalities of these sciences, let us apply their test, I do not say 

 to those portions of the Dene people which live thousands of miles apart, 

 but to a few coterminous tribes of that nation. 



On the Western slope of the Rocky Mountains live side by side three 

 tribes, the Ts(^-'k^hne, the Carriers and the Tsij-Koh-'tin, which may 

 furnish us with convenient material to e.xperiment upon. 



The Tse'kehne are slender and bony, in stature rather below the 

 average, with a narrow forehead, hollow cheeks, prominent cheek bones, 

 small eyes deeply sunk in their orbit, the upper lip very thin, and the 

 lower somewhat protruding, the chin very small and the nose straight. 

 Go and inspect them, and perhaps out of every ten men, five who have 

 long been fathers will appear to you like mere children. I have never 

 seen but one fat person among them and none that was bald. 



Now the Carriers are tall and stout without, as a rule, being too corpu- 

 lent. The men, especially, average i"', 660""" in height. Their forehead 

 is much broader than that of the Tse'kehne, and less receding than is 

 usual with American aborigines. Their face is full, with a nose generally 

 aquiline and in every case better formed than that of their heterogeneous 

 neighbours; their lips are thicker and, their chin more prominent than 



