202 H. P. STEENSBY. 
I shall mention that according to Кмор RASMUSSEN” it was from the 
Pond-Inlet Eskimo who immigrated in the early sixties that the Polar 
Eskimo at Smith Sound first learnt to build snow houses with a long 
passage and an entrance from below. Before then snow houses were 
built, but the passage was shorter, and it was not understood how to 
give the house an entrance from below, and this in spite of the fact that 
such an entrance was used even in the pear-shaped winter houses. 
One might also ask what the conditions were with other features 
common to the different types of Eskimo houses, as, for instance the 
platform and the blubber lamp. As concerns the latter, there can be no 
doubt that Hoven is right in saying that from the very beginning it 
was a necessity for the Eskimo directly they left the forest. The lamp 
must, no doubt, be Palæeskimo; still it is scarcely an Eskimo invention, 
but lamps were no doubt used even as early as the days of the Pale- 
asiatic-American earth-houses. And very likely something similar applies 
to the platforms, even if there may naturally be reason to assume that, 
owing to the Neoeskimo adopting Asiatic culture elements, both the 
lamp and the arrangement of the platform have been subjected to es- 
sential improvements. 
Still one more result must be emphasized as being evident from 
this description of the types of Eskimo dwellings, and that is that one 
cannot imagine this distribution of the rectangular houses of the Neo- 
eskimo group from West Alaska to the shores of the Atlantic east- 
wards, without a spreading, or if one prefers it a migration, of people 
having taken place. For us, one of the most important results of this 
investigation of house types is the fact that Neoeskimo migrations 
from west to east must have taken place. 
Whether these took place at one time and wholly, or at broken inter- 
vals, is at present a minor question. But on the other hand I must at 
once draw attention to the essential difference which exists between 
the nature of these Neoeskimo migrations and the nature of that older 
migration undertaken by the Palæeskimo when they dispersed from the 
Archipelago. The migration of the Palæeskimo must have been of 
rather slow growth, and over regions unknown, the habitable advantages 
of which could be understood only by degrees. The Neoeskimo, on 
the other hand, migrated backwards so to speak, along trodden paths; 
they represent, originally, a surplus Alaskan population which, with its 
higher technical culture, was able to turn the old regions to account in 
a more intensive manner. Probably the Neoeskimo migration does 
not represent one wave of immigrants but more, some of which 
must have reached the remotest districts of Greenland and Labrador. 
Another problem is if these migrations as a rule resulted in a close 
amalgamation of the Palæeskimo and the Neoeskimo before new advan- 
1 Knup Rasmussen, Nye Mennesker, р. 31. 
