An Anthropogeographical Study of the Origin of the Eskimo Culture. 71 
formed during the winter is of vital importance to the inhabitants of 
the Arctic region, because during the greater part of the year it affords 
the only means of communication between the tribes, and because in 
winter the seal, which constitutes the principal food of the Eskimo, 
takes to those parts of the coast where extensive floes are formed. 
Therefore the state of the ice regulates the distribution of the natives 
during the greater part of the year and must be considered in study- 
ing the habits of the Eskimo. The extent of the land ice principally 
depends on the configuration of the land and the strength of the 
currents. On a shore exposed to a strong current an extensive floe 
can only be formed where projecting points of land form deep bays. 
We find the distribution of ice regulated in accordance with this fact 
all around the shores of the Arctic Ocean.” 
It is then not everywhere along the mentioned coasts that Eskimo 
can live. The region is broken up into a series of separate territories 
or centres for population, consisting of protected fjords, sounds and 
inner waters. This holds good of all the Arctic coasts, whereas along 
the Subaretie coasts where hunting on the ice is dropped the settle- 
ments generally are more continuously distributed along the coast. 
In the following, the economic culture of each of these natural 
groups will be investigated with a special view to its adaptation to 
the local conditions of nature. When the whole series is described, 
which here is only to be done briefly and with emphasis upon the 
type, it will be decided which of these nuances of adaptation is the 
original one, and in which district it has its home. 
The first group to be mentioned consists of the Baffinlanders, 
especially studied by Boas, after which come the Labrador Eskimo, 
and then comes the Polar Eskimo group, the most northern but not 
the most pronouncedly Arctic people amongst the Eskimo, and then 
follows the group of West Greenland, from Melville Bay to Cape Fare- 
well, with which there will be some mention of that most interesting 
tribe at Angmagsalik on the east coast of Greenland. The following 
groups will be the Eskimo of the Melville Peninsula, the Kinipetu 
tribe which inhabits the southern part of the Barren Grounds west of 
Chesterfield Inlet, the Netchillik Eskimo or the tribes at the waters 
between King William Land and the mainland, the tribes around 
Coronation Gulf, the Mackenzie Eskimo, the inhabitants of the coasts 
of the Arctic Ocean west of Point Barrow, the Eskimo tribe on the 
west side of Bering Strait, the inhabitants of Norton Sound with the 
Yukon Delta, of Kadjak with neighbouring isles and coasts as also the 
Aleutian Islands. 
With the description of these sections essential regard is paid to 
geographical conditions and none at all to the immediate numeric 
distribution. A consideration of this may, however, also be of interest. 
When one reckons that there are 40,000 Eskimo altogether, about 
