414 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



consider wicked because its only purpose was to do good and that 

 only to others. He said he had had some charms for curing him- 

 self of illness, but had discarded these because they were selfish 

 and he had been taught by the missionaries not to be selfish. 



On October 6th Illun gave me a bit of information that has since 

 been confirmed, at least in part. He said that the inland people 

 of Alaska, such as the groups Noatagmiut, Kagmallirmiut, Killir- 

 miut, used to lose their teeth while still not old through their loosen- 

 ing and dropping out. The coast people, he said, seldom lost teeth 

 this way, but theirs were frequently worn down to the gum through 

 the eating of dried fish or dried meat into which the wind had blown 

 grains of sand. One of my earliest observations when I came to the 

 Eskimos was that those who were not eating civilized food to any 

 extent invariably had undecayed teeth, although they were some- 

 times badly worn down through chewing food containing sand. 

 At the end of my second expedition I brought back to the American 

 Museum of Natural History one hundred and six Eskimo skulls. 

 Not one tooth has so far been noticed in any of these skulls that 

 shows evidence of decay (dental caries) except those where the de- 

 cay followed a breaking of the tooth through accident. But in con- 

 firmation of what Illun now told me and of what J have also ob- 

 served, ten or fifteen per cent of these skulls give seeming evidence 

 of pyorrhea, a disease which frequently leads to the dropping out 

 of the teeth. That pyorrhea was absent on the coast I have not 

 been able to confirm and it may be that lUun's information was 

 wrong on this point. 



It may seem that with a person like Illun, who in that respect 

 is a typical Eskimo, it would be impossible to distinguish between 

 truth and untruth where he gives you myth and miracle with as 

 much confidence as the narrative of the simplest averred fact. 

 But one who knows the Eskimo mode of thought has little difficulty. 

 Illun has told me that when a polar bear kills a seal he takes 

 hold of the skin of the seal at the mouth and, as mentioned already, 

 strips it off as one may remove a stocking by turning it inside 

 out. He has also told me that he never knew a polar bear to eat 

 a fish or to try to catch one, and that he has known of bears 

 walking to the leeward of a pile of dried meat without paying any 

 attention to the smell and evidently failing to realize from the odor 

 that dried meat is food. The first of these stories has no founda- 

 tion whatever and the others are literally fact. The distinction 

 is simple. I must admit, however, that some stories are of such 

 a nature that it is not easy to discriminate between fact and folk- 



