CHAPTER VIII 



THE JOURNEY TO COLLINSON POINT 



WHILE at Barrow this time I observed that the average 

 temperature of the Eskimo houses was lower than it had 

 been with the Eskimos I had lived with farther east. Mr. 

 Brower told me that when he first came to Barrow (I think about 

 1881 ) the Eskimo houses had been much warmer than now. The 

 reasons for the difference were mainly two. The people had gradu- 

 ally changed their more comfortable and sanitary earth-and-wood 

 houses for the nowadays more fashionable and flimsy frame build- 

 ings of imported lumber; and fuel had grown scarcer and more 

 expensive. 



Mr. Brower and others also gave information that the age of matur- 

 ity of Eskimo women is on the average higher now than it was ten or 

 twenty years ago. I made no connection at the time between the fact 

 of the colder houses and the fact of the deferred maturity of the people 

 who dwell in them, and so lost the invaluable opportunity of discussing 

 the conclusion I later arrived at with Mr. Brower, who is an accurate 

 observer, a keen reasoner and has had unequalled opportunities to study 

 the Eskimos during their transition from their native mode of life 

 which was unaltered when he settled among them to the present half- 

 understood and often misapplied "civilization." 



It has been generally supposed that among the peoples of the earth 

 the age of maturity comes earliest in the tropics and increases gradually 

 as one goes northward through the temperate and eventually to the 

 edge of the polar zone. It has been presumed that a similar condition 

 would be found in going south from the equator towards the southern 

 pole. 



If the age of maturity increases with fair regularity as one goes 

 north through Europe from Sicily to Lapland, it would seem there is 

 a direct connection with the decrease in temperature, and this assump- 

 tion has accordingly been generally made. Tables, the sources of which 

 are not always unassailable, have been published to show this direct con- 

 nection between the age of maturity and the temperature. 



But in North America this rule, if it be a rule, has a striking excep- 

 tion. It is not rare among Eskimo women that they have their first 

 child at the age of twelve, and children born before the mothers were 

 eleven have been reported in places where the age of the mother can be 



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