312 REMARKS AND OPINIONS. 



torn of the sea, large twigs, six feet long, wliich, 

 from their near resemblance, they consider to be^ 

 the beard of a gigantic animal, and which appeared 

 to us to be the skeleton of a sea-pen, (^Pennahda.) 



It now remains for us to describe tlie people 

 who inhabit the coasts and islands we have 

 noticed.* 



It is well known that the Tschukutskoi, settled 

 on the north-east point of Asia, the inhabitants of 

 St. Lawrence Island, those of the opposite coast, 

 and in fact all the inhabitants of the northern coasts 

 of America, beginning from Beering's Straits, on 

 the one side southwards, as far as the Konagi, 

 at Kadjak, and the Tschgatzi, at the back of 

 Cook's inlet, and, on the other side, to the north 

 and eastward^ along the Icy Sea, at the mouth of 

 Mackenzie and Copper-mine rivers, as far as the 

 Esquimaux, on the north of Hudson's Bay and 

 Labrador, and to the Greenlanders, and the people, 

 discovered by Ross, in the highest north of Baffin's 

 Bay, belong to one and the same race of men; a 

 race of a decidedly Mongol physiognomy, that of 

 of the Esquimaux, whose Asiatic origin is evident, 

 and whose wandering may easily be followed over 



* We observe that we call most of these people and tribes, 

 mentioned by us, by names which they did not give themselves, 

 but which were imposed upon them by strangers. And this is 

 the case with most people on the earth. Thus the word Aleu- 

 tian seems to be derived from the interrogative particle allix, 

 which struck strangers in the language of that people. 



