248 Morten P. Porsild. 



No. 27. Seal-tail ornaments are not rare in West Greenland, e. g. on 

 small toggles, "feathers" for ernangnaq, etc. 



No. 28. Serrated edges on buckles are very common, for instance on 

 hunting bags. 



No. 29. The dot and circle ornament is common ; see for instance my 

 Fig. 42, D. 



No. 31. At Cape York, also, the men wear hair-bands, not halter-Hke 

 as at Angmagsahk, it is true, but consisting of a single cord round the 

 forehead. I have a carving in wood representing the bust of a man with 

 thick, long hair which is held in place by a cord round the forehead. The 

 piece appears to be very old. I found it in peat on a camping ground on 

 the small island Kavdlunait »unât, east of Egedesminde. The name of the 

 island : "the land of the white men, especially of the Danes" must not lead 

 one to believe that there has ever been a Danish settlement there. The island 

 is uninhabitable because it lacks drinking water ; it belongs to the so-called 

 "Peat islands," the whole island being covered with a homogeneous mass of 

 peat. The name is an old Greenland joke because the island is quite flat. 



No. 33. I doubt whether masks are really unknown in West Greenland 

 Here it is customary on Twelth-night for children and young people to run 

 about from house to house in strange grotesque disguises: skins with the 

 hair outside, women in men's clothing, sometimes with large phallus-like 

 appendages attached. They perform odd dances, must not talk, but only pro- 

 duce indistinct or inarticulate sounds such as hm! el. 1. Usually they wear 

 grotesque masks made of skin ; on one occasion I saw one elaborately carved 

 in wood. These masks do not at all resemble European shrove-tide masks 

 which, though known to most of them, they have no desire to use for this 

 purpose, but they far more closely resemble masks from Alaska. I have not 

 been able to obtain any information as to the age of the custom; it is merely 

 said to be "very old." 



No. 37. Toys with nodding birds are common on the islands in Disco 

 Bay (cf. p. 226). 



No. 39. Slings (igdlûiit, 77) are commonly used by children. 



I should like to conclude these additional notes by adding that 

 the more minutely we study the material culture of the Eskimo, the 

 more homogeneous we find it to be, a fact which accords well with 

 the relatively great homogeneity of the conditions of life which nature 

 ofîers to its children in the Arctic. Each object tells its own story 

 of the difficulties due to stubborn material of inferior quality which 

 have been conquered by an intelligent people with extremely poor 

 tools. Where the needs, and the ways and means of satisfying these 

 needs, are the same, there the implements too will, on the whole, be 

 the same. But that does not prevent a wealth of form as in life itself 

 presenting itself where we have a sufficiently large collection of the 

 same implement, a wealth of form which should warn us against 

 drawing too narrow hmits as regards "types." 



Disco, August 1914. 



