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by long contest with the icy-cohl waters. They were hghted and held 

 under their garments until the heated air, confined by the gut-shirt or kam- 

 layka, had sei'ved its purpose. 



In the course of time, however, wood from the shores, when unsuited 

 for other purposes, was used as fuel, the fires being made in the open air, on 

 stone hearths, built for the purpose. Many of these hearth-stones were 

 found by us bearing the marks of fire. They were preferably somewhat 

 concave on the upper surface, but otherwise irregularly shaped. The natives 

 also used the bones of cetaceans, spongy and full of oil, for fuel. They 

 sometimes placed fish or meat between two concave stones, plastered the 

 chinks with clay, and baked the whole in the fire until done. Much of their 

 food, inclviding alga?, shell-fish, most true fish, the octopus or cuttlefish, and 

 blubber, was eaten raw. The old men, to this day, ascribe the various com- 

 plaints, which have afflicted later generations, chiefly to the ijernicious prac- 

 tice of cooking food. Wood was prepared for various uses by splitting it 

 with a maul and bone wedges. These latter articles are among the most 

 common relics of the Mammalian layer. They are to be distinguished from 

 skin-dressers of similar shape by their ruder outline and by being ham- 

 mered at the broader end. A specimen is here figured, which had received 

 much hard usage. They were usually cut from the jaws or ribs of whales. 

 The cutting of the bone, from the marks left on fragments found in the 

 shell-heaps, was usually done with a shar2:)-edged stone used as a saw or 

 file, and very rarely with any other tool. There is hardl}^ any stone on 

 the islands, such as serpentine, fit for making celts or adzes. They were 

 probably imported from the continental Innuit at great cost, and very 

 highly valued. We know that small thin iron chisels, shaped like the native 

 celt (which was always attached like an adze to a wooden knee or handle), 

 were among the most profit able trading goods of the first discoverers. 

 Fifteen and even twenty of the finest sea-otter skins were cheerfully paid 

 for one. To the great value which they attached to them I refer the 

 absence of these implements from the shell -heaps. Not one was found 

 in all our excavations. And in only one case, that of a comparatively 

 modern, thovigh prehistoric burial-place, has an adze or celt been found 

 in the Aleutian Islands. This is one of the ethnological peculiarities of the 



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