23 



that the culture home may have been situated in the east. We 

 dare only maintain that, as not more than one such home can 

 have existed, in the former case the emigrants from Asia must 

 have crossed Bering's strait as perfectly developed Seaboard- 

 Eskimo, and in the latter, that the further gradual modification 

 of their habits and customs has been opposite to that above 

 suggested. 



THE APPENDED SYNOPTIC VOCABULARY OF THE 

 ESKIMO DIALECTS comprises a General and a Special Part, the 

 latter composed conformedly to the schedules given by Powell 

 in his Introduction to the study of Indian languages, only 

 with some modifications. The said schedules are intended 

 for serving as a guide also to explorers whose chief object 

 had no reference to language, and, in a similar way, they 

 have to be applicable to the vast number of aboriginal 

 idioms existing in America. If this is taken into consideration, 

 the themes proposed by the schedules could hardly have been 

 better selected and arranged than they are. But, if they have 

 to be applied to such a special group of the said languages as 

 the Eskimo dialects, of which two are as well known as those 

 of Greenland and Labrador, some further information may be 

 expected than what the rules contained in the schedules are 

 intended for. In the first place we may recall the often ment- 

 ioned affixes or imperfect words to be connected with the 

 radical words and to express in this way a large number of 

 ideas, that in other languages require the application of sepa- 

 rate words. Secondly we have to call to mind, that the Eskimo 

 language consists almost exclusively of verbs and nouns, and 

 that pronouns and prepositions generally are rendered by flex- 

 ion. If these peculiarities have to be duly considered, the words 

 of our European languages in many cases can not be directly 

 translated into Eskimo, for a dictionary, save by adding some 

 explanation, for which the ordinary synoptical arrangement of the 



