MURDOCH. ] CROOKED KNIVES—ROUND KNIVES. 161 
are as certainly new. Fig. 118a, 118), represent these two knives 
(89580 [1062], 89586 [1061]), which have the blades lashed on with deer 
sinew. It is worthy of note in this connection that there are no stone 
knives of this pattern in the museum from any other locality. 
The women employ for all purposes for which a knife or scissors could 
be used a semicircular knife of the same general type as those described 
by every writer from the days of Egede, who has had to deal with the 
Fia. 118.—Slate-bladed crooked knives. 
Eskimo. The knives at the present day are made of steel, usually, and 
perhaps always, of a piece of a saw blade, which gives a sheet of steel of 
the proper breadth and thickness, and are manufactured by the natives 
themselves. Dr. Simpson says! that in his time they were brought 
from Kotzebue Sound by the Nunataimiun, who obtained them from the 
Siberian Eskimo. There are in the collection three of these steel knives, 
all of the small size generally called wltry (‘little alu”). No, 56546 [14] 
has been picked out for description (Fig. 119). 
The blade is wedged into a handle of walrus 
ivory. The ornamentation on the handle is 
of incised lines and dots blackened. The cut- 
ting edge of the blade is beveled on one face 
only. This knife represents the general 
shape of knives of this sort, but is rather 7% '—Woman's kuife,steel blade. 
smaller than most of them.- I have seen some knives with blades fully 
5 or 6 inches long and deep in proportion. The handle is almost always 
of walrus ivory and of the shape figured. I do not remember ever 
seeing an tu blade secured otherwise than by fitting it tightly into a 
narrow slit in the handle, except in one case, when the handle was part 
of the original handle of the saw of which the knife was made, left 
still riveted on. 
It is not necessary to specify the various purposes for which these 
knives are used. Whenever a woman wishes to cat anything, from her 
food to a thread in her sewing, she uses an tlu in preference to anything 
else. The knife is handled precisely as described among the eastern 
Eskimo, making the cut by pushing instead of drawing,’ thus differing 
from the long-handled round knife mentioned above. Knives of this 
! Op. cit., p. 266. ?See for example, Kumlien, op. cit., p. 26. 
9 ETH——11 
