152 Søren Hansen. 



series of scattered notices in various books of travel, scanty, in- 

 complete and by no means enlightening. Clavering^) has only a 

 few lines on the little, but extremely interesting, Eskimo tribe he 

 met at about 74° lat. N., and his only remark of any value is that 

 Parry's description'^) of the natives at Igloolik in all points fitted 

 the tribe in question. Graah^) is a little fuller, but his scattered 

 remarks only call up a vague and indistinct picture of this people. 

 The same holds good of all the other authors who have occupied 

 themselves with this subject, and it is therefore both intelligible 

 and excusable that the physical characteristics of the present popul- 

 ation have right down to modern times served to bear out the 

 hypothesis of an old Norse colonisation of the East coast of 

 Greenland^), in spite of the fact that little or nothing was known as 

 to the actual appearance of the natives. It ought, however, to be 

 noted that Pansch, after a careful investigation of the skulls which 

 he had himself collected in the vicinity of Cape Borlase Warren, 

 pronounced himself in unmistakable terms against this hypo- 

 thesis of an admixture of European elements^). The skulls which 

 Clavering and the younger Scoresry may possibly have brought 

 home from this district, have, as far as we know, never been de- 

 scribed, and have perhaps entirely disappeared among other Green- 

 land skulls; this is also the case with one Graah brought home 

 with him. On the other hand, Vahl, who was Graah's companion 

 on the first part of his journey, presented A. Retzius with a skull 

 from the East coast, which the latter described in conjunction with 

 one from Upernivik*^). 



The circumstances being such, the Expedition may be said to 

 have brought an entirely new people within the pale of anthropo- 

 logy; and although the picture which might have been formed 

 of them, but for the disturbing influence of the hypothesis of an ad- 

 mixture of Scandinavian blood, might have been more or less in 

 accordance with the facts, it would without this material have 

 entirely lacked the firm ground of positive, detailed information. 



") Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 183Ü. 



-) Journal of a Second Voj'age for the Discovery- of a North-West Passage. London 1824. 

 ■') Undersøgelsesrejse til Østkysten af Grønland. Kbhvn. 1832, pp. 77, 119 etc. 

 •*) Nordenskiöld : Den andra Dicksonska Expeditionen till Grønland. Stockholm 



1885, p. 462. 

 ") 'Here too there is not a single trace of foreign influences from the East, of a 



mixture of 'Norman" blood, as so many would fain believe". Zweite deutsche 



Nordpolarfahrt. Leipzig 1874. II, p. 153. 

 ") Förhandiingar vid de Skandinaviska Naturforskarnes tredje mote. Stockholm 1S42. 



