An Anthropogeographical Study of the Origin of the Eskimo Culture. 105 
covered with turf. The platforms, which were raised 60 cm. from the floor, 
took up about one-third of the interior of the house at the back. Besides 
the dwelling houses, Parry describes some small houses or chests, 1.8 metre 
long and 0.9 metre broad, which were used as food depots. But what is 
most remarkable, as regards house-building at Eivillik and Iglulik, is not 
the variety in construction, but the use of the permanent festival and 
meeting houses (kashims). Such houses are often considered to be peculiar 
to the West Eskimo, but Lyon records the use of them from Iglulik, and 
Hatt from Repulse Bay. The especially large ground-plan of a deserted 
house in Repulse Bay, mentioned by Parry, is probably similar to that of 
a meeting house. In the meeting house observed by HALL in 1866, all the 
Eskimo of the village assembled daily during January and the beginning of 
February to hold festival until the stored up supplies were consumed. Lyon 
believes that the house in Iglulik, where the inhabitants assembled to hold 
festival when a whale had been killed, or on any other joyful occasion, 
is a social relic from former times, and gives a short description of it 
(Lyon I, p. 448). 
In connection with what has been said above regarding the houses on 
the Melville peninsula it is worthy of note that similar winter houses have 
been found among the isolated little group of Eskimo on Southampton 
Island. These houses are built of stones and whales’ bones, and are semi- 
subterranean. The ground-plan is almost circular in form and almost in 
the centre of this is a stone platform (about 60 cm. high), from the middle 
of which “a pillar built up of stone slabs rises to the roof, which is formed 
of jaw-bones and crown-bones of whales, which extend from the outer wall 
to the central support”. Some of the houses have near the passage a small 
out-house which is used as a store house. 
With the exception of an American whaler, who in 1865 is said to 
have met a group of Eskimo in five tents on the coast, G. F. Lyon, on 
his voyage south of the island in August 1824, was the first to meet these 
people. On the south-western side (62° 30’ N. lat., 82° 49’ W. long.), about 
2 kilometres from land, he met an Eskimo who, in place of a kayak, was 
navigating three inflated seal-skins; he sat on the middle one, and had his 
legs, which were provided with sealskin boots, up to his knees in the water; 
and was paddling with a double-bladed paddle of a whale’s bone. Lyon 
found the followmg implements among them: — Flint knives with bone 
handles, bows made of several pieces lashed together, harpoons with shafts 
of whale rib, cooking vessels made of thin slices of limestone very roughly 
cemented, and sledge runners of a whale’s bone. The fact that the group 
which Lyon met, and which consisted of about 20 individuals living in two 
tents, had no kayak is evidently solely due to absence of wood, and by 
no means to want of knowledge of kayaks as Lyon thinks. All the more 
so as he himself found not only a piece of wood carved to represent a kayak, 
but in one place, also came across stone posts which are used by other 
Eskimos (at Eivillik and Iglulik also) to place their kayaks upon. Nor were 
