8 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 6. 
in a restricted area; not that an attempt is made to minimize 
the conservatism of the Eskimo — one sees and hears every- 
where evidences of its being a conservatism well-nigh incom- 
prehensible to members of our race. Language, processes, and 
modes of thought, furnish, however, more convincing evidences 
of a common origin in a restricted area than do songs, tales, 
isolated beliefs, and portable artifacts. The Alaskan Eskimo 
in our employ were not quite a year in contact with the people 
of Coronation gulf and Victoria island, yet there are few persons 
now in Coronation gulf that do not know one or more songs 
from Port Clarence, Alaska, and the Mackenzie delta, while 
songs composed at Bathurst inlet will within a year or two be 
sung at Port Clarence, Alaska, One of the most popular songs 
now heard in Coronation gulf, celebrates the merits of the tea 
sold at Fort Macpherson, Mackenzie river, and another tells 
of the wreck of the whaler “Alexander” at Cape Parry (1906), yet 
these people, when they learnt the songs from us, had never 
tasted tea nor seen a ship. They talk of mountain goats (as 
the Greenlanders talk of mammoth) wisely, after seeing my 
sleeping bag and listening to the hunting adventures of one 
of our men. They accepted fragments of Christianity promptly 
on the say-so of my companions — not very orthodox Christianity 
naturally, for the mental processes of my men are not quite 
the same as those of the missionary who taught them. They 
had, when we first came to them, imitations of white men’s 
articles of which few or none had seen the original — e. g., scis- 
sors. Knowing the continuity of trade routes between east and 
west, the rapidity of traffic, the readiness with which new ideas 
are adopted (modified, of course, to fit into the recipient’s scheme 
of thought), may we not say that identity or similarity (e.g.) 
of needlecases in Smith sound and Alaska is as likely to be an 
evidence of the activity of commerce as of a common culture 
home and rockbound conservatism ? And may not a song or 
story heard in Smith sound and Alaska have accompanied the 
needlecase from its source in Kotzebue sound ? Or, be the 
needlecase of a material peculiar to Smith sound, then may 
it not have been made in imitation of an imported article, just 
as Coronation Gulf Eskimo to-day make scissors (of caribou 
