254 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



scendants have borne unremittingly and will continue to carry in spite 

 of, and forsooth because of, the progress of invention. 



The whole world is covered with megalithic monuments in the erection 

 of which it is extremely doubtful whether any living beings were used 

 except men. In the Easter Island are immense platforms on which stand 

 images weighing from three to twenty tons. These have been hewn 

 out in the crater of a volcano and moved in some instances several miles 

 over a region as rough as it can be. On the monuments of Egypt are 

 exhibited teams of men hitched to long cables dragging a sledge on 

 which sits an enormous statue. Boilers were used and greased tracks, 

 but we look in vain for the pulley. The immense buildings on our own 

 continent from Central Mexico to Southern Peru were the sole work of 

 man. Without a draft animal he brought together the material for 

 his splendid palaces and temples, and put every stone in place with his 

 own hands. We may go further than this. Long after horses, camels, 

 oxen, mules, and donkeys were used as beasts of burden the wagons 

 and wheel conveyances were so clumsy as to be practically useless in 

 transporting heavy loads. All over Asia, and indeed in many parts of 

 Europe, the inconvenience of clumsy carriages kept rapid transport in 

 the hands of human bearers. 



To one who believes implicitly in the universal domination of inven. 

 tion throughout all human activities, the temptation is great to pass 

 beyond the study of the human bearer to those intermediate stages be- 

 tween the same and the shifting of the load to vehicles and the backs of 

 animals. As interesting to the technologist as to the naturalist are 

 those intermediate forms that now and then appear to confirm his 

 theories of creation. 



The forces of nature, the wind, the water-fall, the expansion of steam, 

 the electric current would form another series, the last in the climax, in 

 which the wind acts directly like a hand ; the water, through machinery, 

 as a hand turning a crank; the steam, through change of form and the 

 element, like a hand winding a spring; the electricity, through chemical 

 changes, like a hand discharging a gun. 



THE ESKIMO CARRIER. 



Let us commence the special application of our subject at the farthest 

 north, the land of almost perpetual ice and snow. What time the Es- 

 kimo freight-man is not moving about in open waters moving chattels 

 and merchandise from place to place in the lightest of all boats, the seal- 

 skin pontoon or oomiak, he appears as a draft-man, dragging the 

 dead seal or other game over the ice by means of a rawhide line. He 

 has invented an infinite variety of toggles, made chiefly of walrus ivory 

 in shape of seal, walrus, bear, and other game. These are grasped in 

 the hand firmly, the rawhide line passing out between the ring and the 

 middle finger. The short piece of rawhide attached thereto is a loop 

 which is connected by an easily detachable arrangement to the drag- 



