486 



known. Ryder has supplemented his drawing of the fragment 

 with some imaginary dotted lines, which bring out the resem- 

 blance to the Alaska form of a throwing-stick. 



However, this correspondence is a mere coincidence, as I 

 am now going to prove. The proof, however, was not derived 

 from the specimen found by Amdrup, which is broken at about 

 the same place as that of Ryder's, although this stump, which 

 is longer than Ryder's fragment, did not bear out his hypothesis. 

 In the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin my attention was 

 first drawn to an elongated wooden implement from North East 

 Greenland, which I had not seen before from Eskimo districts, 

 but the expanding shaft end of which was formed like the 

 handle of a throwing-stick and like the object found by Am- 

 drup. In the inventories of the museum it is designated as a 

 "Dolch ohne Spitze" (inv. No. IV A 198), brought home by 

 the German North Pole Expedition, but it is not figured among 

 the illustrations of the report of the Expedition. It will be 

 found illustrated here in the Appendix, fig. 103. 



As to the use to which it was applied, it must be admitted 

 that as the type is not known from elsewhere, and as we cannot 

 obtain any information from the people itself, which is extinct, 

 we are thrown upon guess-work. The designation of the spe- 

 cimen in the museum as a dagger can only be taken into 

 consideration, if special grounds should be found to argue for 

 it. The implement has a point, in so far as at the narrow 

 end it is bevelled from two sides, and by means of two inden- 

 tations two small lateral barbs not far from the end have been 

 formed. It is just as long, or longer, than a throwing-stick, 

 but it is not a throwing-stick. 



When I found in the ethnographical section of the Riks- 

 museum at Stockholm among the objects brought home from 



') Stolpe PI. 5, fig. 17; cf. p. 104 "ein eigentümliches Gerät dessen Bedeut- 

 ung noch nicht ermittelt ist". 



