ETHNOLOGY OF ARCTIC AMERICA 175 



the increased strain on the temporal muscles. And no one has studied 

 the Eskimos at different periods of the year to discover whether there 

 is any seasonal variation in glandular or nervous activity. Even if 

 we are certain that climate and food (aided perhaps by inbreeding) 

 could produce the specialized Eskimo type, it would be exceedingly 

 interesting to know how long a period nature has required to bring 

 about this result. Do the crania in the most ancient ruins reproduce 

 faithfully the peculiar characteristics of the modern Eskimo? This 

 question involves still another. Are the differences that we know 

 exist between the Eskimos of different regions to be ascribed very 

 largely to varied admixture with Indian and Asiatic tribes, or are they 

 also caused, in the main, by slight differences in the environment? 



Eskimo Peopling of Greenland; Endemism of 

 Eskimo Culture 



A few problems have been purposely omitted from this discussion. 

 One relates specifically to Greenland. Certain writers hold that 

 this island continent was peopled in two waves; that the first body 

 of immigrants traveled by sled through the northern archipelago, 

 up the west coast of Ellesmere Island, across the north end of Green- 

 land, and down its east coast, giving rise to the present tribe at 

 Angmagssalik ; and that the second, starting at a later period, skirted 

 in boats the coast of Baffin Bay and settled along the western shore 

 of Greenland. This theory will probably stand or fall according to 

 the discoveries that result from the geological and topographical 

 survey of the entire coast of Greenland now being planned by the 

 Danish government. Another problem, how much of the culture of 

 the Eskimos is their own invention, how much they have borrowed 

 from tribes immediately adjacent to them, whether in America or 

 Asia, and how much is a heritage from a far-distant past common 

 to all or most of the aborigines of North America, can be investigated 

 in libraries and museums more easily than by the worker in the field. 

 In this paper I have tried to present only those problems that depend 

 for their solution on further explorations in the American Arctic. 



