414 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1890. 



(3) Specimens made from iron, wood, and other materials gathered 

 from wrecks. The art in this case is more decidedly native than it is 

 in Nbs. 1 and 2. 



(4) Specimens made of native material, but the carving on the 

 handles was done with iron or steel blades set in native handles. This 

 form of ulus marks a very peculiar phase of contact between savagery 

 and civilization, worthy of careful study by all technologists and arch- 

 aeologists. To be more explicit, when the voyageurs and explorers 

 entered the fur-producing sections of our continent in the sixteenth 

 century, they made no attempt to change a single industry or social 

 structure of the aborigines. They only sought to profit by their native 

 arts, and in order to do so simply removed the stone arrow point to 

 substitute one of hoop-iron, or replaced the bow by a better implement, 

 the rifle. If at the same time the traders brought steel-bladed pocket 

 knives, steel files, aud a few other primitive tools, and if at this period 

 the natives were still building mounds and carving stone, then we 

 could easily account for the more refined pipes and other artefacts 

 which seem to point to a knowledge of steel, without recourse to the 

 suspicion of fraudulent manufacture. At any rate, the art of ivory 

 carving bloomed out among the Eskimo on the acquisition of steel 

 carving tools. The Russian fur traders and the Hudson Bay factors 

 have beeu always careful to preserve the native in his simplicity and 

 to break up his manner of liviug as little as possible. When this 

 golden mean was transcended the native art began to decay. The 

 most intelligent and skillful were won over to the higher arts of the 

 cultured races aud the older arts were left to languish in the suburbs 

 even of barbarism. 



(5) Specimens entirely native in material and workmanship. These 

 are the rare specimens, frequently old, mostly from out of the way 

 places and not of the highest finish. The limitations are those iucident 

 to the poorer tools of savagery. They have blades of polished slate 

 or chipped stone; handles of wood, bone, ivory or antler; glue of 

 native manufacture or lashing of spruce root, rawhide, or sinew. 



IV.— SURVIVALS. 



The ulu is found in civilization under two well-known forms, the 

 saddler's knife aud the kitchen knife. 



The saddler's knife may be seen in the hands of a workman on the 

 Epyptiau monuments (PI. lii, Fig. 1), showing that very early in the his- 

 tory of industry, just as soon as a sufficient number of men could be re- 

 lieved from the function of weapon bearing, they little by little assumed 

 some of the more masculine of woman's occupations. It is just as if the 

 woman of an advancing people had taught the man to work in leather 

 and had then passed over to him the apparatus of the craft. It is 

 worthy of notice that the shoemaker has repudiated the ulu form and 

 the cutting from him and has adopted the common knife. The saddler 



