1887] On Some Popular Errors in Regard to the Eskimos. II 
as she lay at anchor, and the people from the vessel occasionally 
visited the shore. I know from experience the difficulty of ob- 
taining accurate information under such circumstances. 
The statement, therefore, is not free from suspicion, especially 
as Seemann follows it up with another at variance with the ex- 
perience of later explorers in the same region, and, indeed, of 
those who have been brought in contact with the Eskimos in 
most other places,—namely, that “after the marriage ceremony 
has been performed infidelity is very rare” (zrd.). 
These instances stand almost alone. The only other case 
where anything of the kind is to be found is: in Graah’s 
“ Narrative of an Expedition to the East Coast of Greenland,” 
where he says, “report [among the West Greenlanders] said 
that the inhabitants of the East Coast were accustomed, when 
visited by scarcity, to destroy their women, so that the sex was 
usually at a premium among them, every woman having two 
or three husbands” (p. 78). He, however, makes no mention of 
finding any such cases among the East Greenlanders when he 
visited them, but, on the contrary, speaks of one man with two 
and another with three wives, which indicates anything but a 
scarcity of women. 
On the same page of Hovelacque and Hervé’s book it is 
stated, “ Les Eskimaux habitent, selon la saison, des tentes de 
peaux ou des trous creusés en terre.” “ Holes dug in the earth” 
seems, to say the least, an exaggeration to one who has ever 
entered one of the comfortable and neatly-built wooden houses 
of the northwestern Eskimos, though these are covered by a 
mound of turf, or one of the extensive structures described by 
Captain Graah, who gives the most detailed description of the 
Greenlander’s house (“ Narrative,” etc., pp. 45 and 46), sometimes 
sixty feet long, accommodating seven or eight families, with 
“regular walls, from six to eight feet high, built of earth and 
stones,” roofed with beams covered with sticks and turf. 
In fact, as far as I can discover from consulting a very large 
number of original authorities, the Eskimo winter-house is never 
more than partially underground, and in some cases even some- 
what elevated above the surface of the earth, while throughout 
the great middle region, from Hudson’s Bay northward am 
the archipelagos, the winter-house is generally of snow, built up, 
on the frozen ground. It is indeed surprising that anything so 
