136 The East Greenlanders. [ Feb. 
landic or are doubtful in the other dialects, may be roughly stated 
in percentages, from the material at his command, as follows: 
in the Labrador dialect, fifteen per cent.; in the middle regions, 
twenty per cent.; in the Mackenzie region, thirty-one per cent. ; 
and in Alaska, fifty-three per cent. A careful study of the vocab- 
ulary collected by our expedition (U. S. International Polar Ex- 
pedition to Point Barrow, Alaska), containing over one thousand 
words, in which about five hundred and fifty radicals may be dis- 
tinguished, has convinced me that only fifteen ae cent. of these 
are different from the Greenlandic radicals. 
There is no doubt, as our author believes, that the inhabitants of 
East Greeland and Alaska, brought together and allowed suffi- 
cient time, could easily learn to understand each other. In fact, 
the interpreters from Labrador who accompanied the English 
explorers had no difficulty in conversing with the western nations, 
and I have seen American whalemen, who had made themselves 
familiar with the Eskimo jargon in use at Hudson’s Bay, converse 
fluently with the natives of Point Barrow. 
Dr. Rink believes that the dialectic differences indicate that 
the Aleuts were first separated from the parent stock, then, and 
much later, the Southern and Northern Alaskan Eskimos, those 
of the Mackenzie, and finally those of the middle region, and that 
Labrador and Greenland were peopled by branches from the last. 
Coming, now, to the consideration of the peculiarities of the 
newly-discovered East Greenlanders, he considers them in much 
the same condition as their western neighbors when described by 
Egede. One noticeable peculiarity about their harpoon is men- 
tioned,—namely, that the head is fastened to the shaft by a pivot, 
as in the “toggle-iron” used by civilized whalemen, whereas 
among all other Eskimos the head slips off the shaft and “tog- 
gles” at right angles to the line. The harpoon-float is made of 
two bladders instead of one, and the old implements for taking 
seals on the ice, abandoned on the west coast since the introduc- 
tion of firearms, are still in general use. 
_ The bow is no longer used, owing to the disappearance of the | 
reinde, but cross-bows are used as toys by the children, or for 
_ shooting birds. The knowledge of this weapon, the writer be- 
_ lieves, is due to foreign influence. They have no fish-hooks, but 
: - Oe oe ee a RA used by 
the Es! p ey ka 
