A FRAGMENT OF HUMAN SKELETON FROM 

 NORTH LATITUDE 81° 42'. 



DR. EDWARD L. MOSS. 

 Late Surgeon H.M.S. Alert. 



[Read November 19, 1877.] 



At the time the Arctic Expedition of 1875, left England, all that 

 was known of the migrations of the Eskimo appeared to warrant 

 the hope expressed in the manual supplied to the expedition by 

 the Royal Geographical Society that Ethnological results of 

 interest might be obtained. That hope was based upon the con- 

 sideration that the route chosen for the expedition lay through 

 an altogether exceptional region, exceptional in that it afforded 

 the only ascertained gap in the northern frontier line bounding 

 the geographical distribution of man. 



In every other part of the circumpolar regions expeditions 

 had penetrated either to lands, such as Spitzbergen or Franz 

 Joseph Land, that bore no trace of an indigenous people, or to a 

 barrier of eastward drifting perennial floes, impassable alike by 

 Eskimo or European, and which if their full import had been 

 appreciated might have saved much speculation as to the possi- 

 bility of an inhabited Polynia in the middle of the Polar ice-cap. 



But on the eastern side of the Parry group, and along both 

 shores of Greenland, land spread continuously to the northward, 

 and though each successive explorer had forced his way to a 

 latitude never before reached on land, all had been obliged to 

 confess that at their turning point the foot-prints of their un- 

 civilized predecessors still lead Poleward. 



When our ships started, the most northern known traces of 

 man, were those found by Dr. Bessels, of the U.S.S. Polaris, 

 at Cape Lupton. There, within a day's march of the furthest 

 point on land reached by his expedition, rings of stones that 

 had been used to fasten down the edges of tents, marked the 

 temporary camp of some travelling Eskimo. 



