174 POLAR PROBLEMS 



of the tribes in the Mackenzie River delta or on the east coast of 

 Hudson Bay. Even in Alaska the folklorist, the sociologist, and the 

 student of primitive religions will find mines of fabulous richness 

 that such veteran ethnologists as Murdoch and Nelson hardly did 

 more than sample. Of all these regions the east coast of Hudson 

 Bay has perhaps the first claim to investigation, because it may throw 

 much-needed light on the religious beliefs and mythology of the 

 Labrador Eskimos and on the depth to which they were affected by 

 their contact with the Indians. On the other hand, philologists 

 who are attempting to reconstruct the ancient stem forms of Eskimo 

 words, in order to compare them with the ancient stem forms in 

 various Asiatic languages, require more than all else phonetically 

 accurate vocabularies of the dialects in western Arctic America. 

 The writer has, indeed, compiled extensive vocabularies from two 

 places in that region, Point Barrow and Cape Prince of Wales; and 

 he has smaller vocabularies from Nunivak Island, East Cape in Si- 

 beria, and one or two other districts. In collecting them he discovered 

 that the dialects of the Siberian coast and of the Yukon and Kusko- 

 kwim deltas diverged more widely from those spoken north of Norton 

 Sound than the latter from the dialects of far-distant Greenland and 

 Labrador. This has undoubtedly an important bearing on the early 

 history of the Eskimos, although its full import is not yet clear. One 

 fact is evident, however; we must have more complete information 

 concerning the dialects spoken around Bering Sea before we can 

 formulate the main phonetic rules that have brought into existence 

 the different varieties of the Eskimo tongue. To attempt to correlate, 

 as some writers have done, a modern Eskimo dialect with a modern 

 European or Asiatic dialect, without taking into account their separate 

 histories, seems as difficult an undertaking as to compare modern 

 English with modern Hindustani without a knowledge of Sanskrit. 



Problems in Physical Anthropology 



Turning now from archeology and ethnology to physical an- 

 thropology, the first question that confronts us is the effect of Arctic 

 life on the anatomy of the Eskimos. We know that their skin color 

 is lighter than that of most Mongoloid peoples, that the nasal aperture 

 is the smallest in the world, and that the head and face have certain 

 marked peculiarities. Most authorities ascribe these changes to the 

 combined effect of climate and food — to the diminished intensity 

 of the sun's rays, the low temperature combined with great huniidity, 

 and the unvaried diet of meat and fish, eaten raw, frozen, or im- 

 perfectly cooked. But we really know very little concerning the result 

 of a diet that excludes practically all vegetable products, the phys- 

 iological result, that is, as well as the purely mechanical, such as 



