GLIMPSES OF FEE-HISTORIC TIMES. 49 



with the most bitter hostility. On the west, however, 

 they pass into the Eastern Siberians on the one hand, 

 and into the West-coast Indians on the other, both 

 by language and physical characters. They and the 

 northern tribes at least of West-coast Indians, belong 

 in all probability to a wave of population spreading 

 from Behring Strait. They were the Skraelings, or 

 dwarfs, of the ancient Icelandic voyagers who early 

 visited and colonised Greenland ; and as they repre- 

 sented the inhabitants of Vinland, which seems to 

 have been on the coast of New England, as Skraelings, 

 it has been supposed that the Esquimaux formerly 

 extended farther to the south than at present. It is, 

 however, not unlikely that the Northmen may have 

 regarded the Indians also as Skraelings. 



South of the Esquimaux there extends, from near 

 the west coast far into the interior, a series of tribes 

 whose languages and manners are intermediate be- 

 tween those of the last mentioned people and the 

 Indians to the south. These are the Tinne, or Chippe- 

 wyans. There is reason to believe that at one time they 

 extended quite to the Atlantic coast, and that some 

 of the primitive tribes of Labrador, the Ked Indians 

 of Newfoundland, and the pre-historic peoples who are 

 said by tradition to have been displaced by the Algon- 

 quin tribes of Nova Scotia and New England, belonged 

 to this stock. The Tinne are either a mixed people, 

 intermediate between the Indians and Esquimaux, or 

 a more ancient people than either, hemmed in between 

 the northern and southern streams of migration. 



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