16 



and finally throwing and hitting the object with the harpoon, 

 which itself is implied by each of them. 



VARIOUS WORDS RELATING TO ARCTIC NATURE. 



The seabirds, as already mentioned, although contributing largely 

 to animate certain parts of the arctic regions during the summer, 

 can not with safety be counted with the objects for which the 

 arctic settlers had to form new names. Certainly however some 

 of them may have got their names in this way. In the appended 

 tables no selection of this kind has been tried; they contain: 

 the species usually grouped under the common term of geese 

 and ducks, and a series of others from the genera Colymbus, 

 Larus , Pelecanus, Procellaria, Uria, comprising all those that 

 have value in the domestic economy of the Greenlanders and 

 showing a striking resemblance of names between Greenland 

 and the extreme west. The names of fish are but few in the 

 western vocabularies and therefore also but poorly represented 

 in our tables, while at the same time we here observe a some- 

 what greater diff"erence too. Of course in the present investig- 

 ation there is only talk of saltwater fish, and these appear to 

 be of much less importance to the Western Eskimo than to 

 the Labradorians and Greenlanders; on the other hand salmon 

 constitute one of the staple articles of food of the inhabitants 

 of Alaska. However one well known name of a saltwater fish 

 useful to the northern Greenlanders, the eqaluvaq, according to 

 Jacobsen is met with here in the Extreme West, where its take 

 has been rich enough to give the month July its name, and on 

 the Asiatic side of Bering-Strait we find named the ilvaq which 

 on account of its widely spread occurrence in the course of 

 ages has saved many natives of Greenland from starvation. 



As for the rest, in referring to our said tables, we will 

 only call attention to some names in the domain of physical 

 geography, as relating to the ocean, saltwater, and the tides, 

 all of which are identical in the east and the west. One word, 



