ESKIMO TRADITIONS. 231 



them upon the rivers and lakes in that part of America. This de- 

 velopment must have been promoted by the necessity of co-operating 

 for mutual defence against the inland people : but as soon as a certain 

 stage of development was attained, and the tribes spread over the 

 Arctic coasts towards Asia on the one side and Greenland on tho 

 other, the further improvement of the race appears to have ceased, 

 or to have been considerably checked. 



The author draws a comparison between tho Eskimo and tho 

 nations adjoining them, both in Asia and America, in regard to their 

 arts of subsistence, language, social laws, customs, traditions, and 

 other branches of culture, particularly dwelling on their traditions, 

 of which he has collected a great number from all the inhabited 

 places on the east side of Davis Straits, together with some from 

 East Greenland and Labrador. He shows that an astonishing re- 

 semblance exists between the stories received from the most distant 

 places, as, for instance, between those of Cape Farewell and Labra- 

 dor, the inhabitants of which appear to have had no intercourse with 

 each other for upwards of a thousand years. As the distance from 

 Cape Farewell to Labrador, by the ordinary channels of Eskimo 

 communication, is as far as from either of those two places to the 

 most western limit of the Eskimo region, it may be assumed that a 

 certain stock of traditions is more or less common to all the tribes of 

 Eskimo. The author's studies have led him to the following con- 

 clusions : 1. That the principal stock of traditions were not invented 

 from time to time, but originated during the same stage of their 

 migrations, in which the nation developed itself in other branches 

 of culture ; viz., the period during which they made the great step 

 from an inland to a coast people. The traditions invented subse- 

 quent to this are more or less composed of elements taken from the 

 older stories, and have only had a more or less temporary existenco, 

 passing into oblivion during tho lapse of one or two centuries. 

 2. That the real historical events upon which some of the principal 

 of the oldest tales are founded, consisted of wars conducted against 

 the same hostile nations, or of journeys to the same distant countries ; 

 and that the original tales were subsetruently localised, the present 

 narrators pretending that the events took place each in the country 

 in which they now reside — as, for instance, in Greenland, or even 

 in special disiricts of it. By this means it has come to pass that 

 the men and animals of the original tales, which are wanting in tho 

 localities in which the several tribes havo now settled, have been 

 converted into supernatural beings, many of which are now sup- 

 posed to be occupying tho unknown regions in the interior of 

 < I reenland. 



