720 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. (VOL XXXII. 
we found their habits and customs essentially the same as 
they were when described by the surgeon of the English ship 
“ Plover,” which wintered at Point Barrow during the Franklin 
search expeditions in the seasons of 1852-54. Since our time, 
however, numerous parties of white men have lived continu- 
ously at the Point, engaged in shore whaling and trading, and 
of late years there have been missionaries and a school-teacher 
there, so that, as I am informed, affairs are very different from 
what we saw then. What I have to say, therefore, must be 
understood to apply only to the time of my own personal 
experiences. 
The country which these people inhabit forms the extreme 
northwestern angle of the continent of North America. The 
permanent winter villages are all on the strip of coast which 
runs northeast from Kotzebue Sound and terminates in the 
sandspit of Point Barrow. The shore of the Arctic Ocean east 
of this point is uninhabited until we reach Herschel Island, in 
British territory, near the Mackenzie River, though, in their 
summer wanderings, the people from Point Barrow often went as 
far east as the Colville River, and sometimes to Herschel Island. 
On the sandspit at Point Barrow there is a large village, and 
eleven miles down the coast, at Cape Smyth, another almost as 
large, near which our station was situated. These two villages 
formed practically one community. The next village was 70 
miles further down the coast, near Point Belcher. The Point 
Barrow natives had but little to do with this village and prac- 
tically nothing with the more distant ones. Their knowledge 
of the interior was confined to a somewhat limited region 75 Or 
100 miles inland, whither they went in early autumn and late 
winter to hunt reindeer on the upper waters of the large rivers 
which empty into the Arctic Ocean east of Point Barrow. The 
country is a rolling plateau of slight elevation, presenting the 
general appearance of a country overspread with glacial drift. 
Small lakes and ponds, which are sometimes connected by in- 
considerable streams, abound, becoming more numerous as the 
land grows lower towards the north. Along the shore line the 
plateau terminates in steep banks of clay, gravel, and pebbles, 
looking much like glacial drift, bordered by a narrow steep beach 
