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enormous field of linguistic study. What I have invited 

 attention to is only the results of a first reconnoitring- occas- 

 ioned by my study of North Greenlandic phonetics. However 

 uncertain many of these results may be, yet I hope that they 

 will at least in part be of some assistance if anyone should 

 sometime undertake to compare the Eskimo family of languages 

 either with neighboring or more distant languages with a view 

 to finding the hitherto undiscovered genetical connection, if 

 there is any, between these and some other languages on the 

 face of the globe. If they are not in any other way connected 

 with other languages, they may at any rate have adopted foreign 

 elements from one or several of them. 



Few peoples, or perhaps no other people in the world, 

 have such strange boundaries to their territory as the Eskimo, 

 living as they do along the edge of the shrunk ice-regions of 

 the glacial period and on the northern edge of the inhabited 

 places of mankind, with outposts in the east on the northern- 

 most coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, occupying in the west the 

 only point where the old and the new world meet, — a long 

 narrow chain of primitive human beings, the two ends of which 

 have long ago lost connection with, and consciousness of each 

 other, but which is held together by their common and pristine 

 language. 



