1914] Northwestern D6nes and Northeastern Asiatics 161 



and other northeastern Asiatics and the native Americans of the Far 

 Northwest. Sir George Simpson is a witness to this fact when he writes: 

 "While stroUing about, I observed in the brook a number of baskets 

 and weirs for taking fish, such as I had seen on the Columbia and in 

 New Caledonia".^ 



The contrivances are, indeed, so much like not only those used by 

 the Indians of those regions, but also those resorted to by my former 

 charge, that Bush and myself described them in exactly the same terms, 

 viz. as "long, funnel-shaped baskets", at a time when I was not even 

 aware of the existence of the former's book!^ 



The Am.erican traveller further remarks: "This kind of trap I after- 

 ward found in use among nearly all the tribes from the Amoor to the 

 Arctic". 



If I mistake not, the reader must by this time concede that there 

 is a wonderful identity between the technology of the American and 

 Asiatic tribes. But this is not all. 



VIII. 



In Asia, no less than in America, it is chiefly salmon which is the 

 object of the fishing industry. The way it is cured is identical on either 

 side of the Aleutian Islands. In the words of George Kennan, it is 

 "cut open, cleaned and boned by the women with the greatest skill 

 and celerity, and hung in long rows upon horizontal poles to dry".^ 



Apropos of fish and fishing, a remark of Wrangell's, which that explorer 

 applies to the natives of the Lower Kolyma, recalls a foible of the Den6 

 gourmet: his inordinate liking for fish-roe. "As an occasional delicacy", 

 he writes, "they have baked cakes of fish-roe".^ 



The natives here referred to are the Yakuts. Since those nomads 

 are nothing else than an offshoot of the great Tatar race,^ it may not 

 be out of place to recall in this connection analogies between the latter 

 while "at table" and the North American Indians, especially those of 

 the Far Northwest. 



In the first place, both people wash themselves in exactly the same 

 characteristic way, that is, by filling their mouth with water and then 



1 "An Overland Journey", vol. II, p. 348 of English edition. New Caledonia was 

 to the early fiudson's Bay Company traders what is now called British Columbia 

 minus the territory south of the Thompson River. 



^ Bush, op. cit., p. 172; Morice, "Notes . . . On the Western D^nes", p. 84. 



^ "Tent Life in Siberia", p. 154. 



* "Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea", p. 75. 



^Wrangell, op. cit., pp. 23, 171; Ledyard, "Life and Travels", p. 280; P. Dobell, 

 "Travels", Vol. II, pp. 13, iii. 



