MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 6. 



in a restricted area; not that an attempt is made to minimize 

 the conservatism of the Eskimo one sees and hears every- 

 where evidences of its being a conservatism well-nigh incom- 

 prehensible to members of our race. Language, processes, and 

 modes of thought, furnish, however, more convincing evidences 

 of a common origin in a restricted area than do songs, tales, 

 isolated beliefs, and portable artifacts. The Alaskan Eskimo 

 in our employ were not quite a year in contact with the people 

 of Coronation gulf and Victoria island, yet there are few persons 

 now in Coronation gulf that do not know one or more songs 

 from Port Clarence, Alaska, and the Mackenzie delta, while 

 songs composed at Bathurst inlet will within a year or two be 

 sung at Port Clarence, Alaska. One of the most popular songs 

 now heard in Coronation gulf, celebrates the merits of the tea 

 sold at Fort Macpherson, Mackenzie river, and another tells 

 of the wreck of the whaler "Alexander" at Cape Parry (1906), yet 

 these people, when they learnt the songs from us, had never 

 tasted tea nor seen a ship. They talk of mountain goats (as 

 the Greenlanders talk of mammoth) wisely, after seeing my 

 sleeping bag and listening to the hunting adventures of one 

 of our men. They accepted fragments of Christianity promptly 

 on the say-so of my companions not very orthodox Christianity 

 naturally, for the mental processes of my men are not quite 

 the same as those of the missionary who taught them. They 

 had, when we first came to them, imitations of white men's 

 articles of which few or none had seen the original e. g., scis- 

 sors. Knowing the continuity of trade routes between east and 

 west, the rapidity of traffic, the readiness with which new ideas 

 are adopted (modified, of course, to fit into the recipient's scheme 

 of thought), may we not say that identity or similarity (e.g.) 

 of needlecases in Smith sound and Alaska is as likely to be an 

 evidence of the activity of commerce as of a common culture 

 home and rockbound conservatism ? And may not a song or 

 story heard in Smith sound and Alaska have accompanied the 

 needlecase from its source in Kotzebue sound ? Or, be the 

 needlecase of a material peculiar to Smith sound, then may 

 it not have been made in imitation of an imported article, just 

 as Coronation Gulf Eskimo to-day make scissors (of caribou 



