384 Notes on tlie Baees of Eein Deer. [No. 4, 



race. We may accordingly presume that the current statement that 

 the further northward tbis animal inhabits, the larger it grows, is 

 true only within certain limitations, depending much on the eharac- 

 ter of the country. The large woodland race, indeed, inhabits south- 

 ward of the small barren-ground race : the former migrating in 

 summer to the polar sea ; the latter southward to the mountains of 

 the interior 5 and this alike in Asia and America. 



A NOTE ON THE ANTIQUITY OF THE HUMAN RACES. 



To which I am induced by recalling to mind a passage in the 

 Introduction to Yon Wrangell's ' Narrative of an Expedition to the 

 Polar Sea' (Sabine's Translation, p. cxvii), wherein a flint implement 

 is mentioned as being in use in modern times (A. D. 1809). 

 Indeed, elsewhere (p. 376), Von Wrangell notices, of the Tschuktschi, 

 that — " Iron being scarce, they sometimes employ Walrus tusks 

 ^nstead ;" and also that — " The inhabitants of the Aleutian Isles 

 use spears pointed with slate in killing Whales" (p. 340). So did 

 other Esquimaux further east (i. e. in America) fashion slate as well 

 as bone weapons until they became acquainted with the use of iron, 

 and acquired possession of metal instruments from their European 

 visitors. — " On Fadegew Island, Sannikow found a Jahakir sledge, 

 and a knife, such as is generally used for scraping Rein Deer skins. 

 The blade, however, was not of iron, but of a hard üi&rpjlint. In 

 New Siberia they had found an axe made of the tusk of a Mammoth." 

 — Now Nilsson, exploring certain exceedingly antique tumuli in 

 Scania (the soutliernmost province of Sweden), found in them flint 

 arrow-heads or spear-heads — the so-called Celts or Kelts, — together 

 with bones of now extinct mammalia, and human bones including 

 skulls, which skulls were distinctly of the hyperborean type of 

 humankind, in a latitude considerably to the southward of the abode 

 of the hyperborean Mongol at the present epoch, unless where a 

 a much severer winter climate obtains ! Considering the ultra- 

 remote antiquity of the ' Celts' elsewhere discovered in températe 

 latitudes, does not Nilsson's discovery somewhat point to the glacial 

 period of Agassiz ? Albeit the human animal most assuredly never 

 originated in the circum-polar regions, any more than on the minor 

 continent now called America, however ancient may be the indis- 





