ALASKA AS IT WAS AND IS. 
141 
servations to be made on the glaciers. Our explorations 
showed that north of the Alaskan mountains, as in some 
parts of Siberia, there are no glaciers, and there has been no 
glaciation in the ordinary sense, but that in its stead we 
have the singular phenomenon of the Ground-ice formation, 
a state of affairs in which ice plays the part of a more or less 
regularly interstratified rock, above which are the clays con¬ 
taining remains of the mammoth and other animals, show¬ 
ing that they became extinct not because of the refrigeration 
of the region, but coincidently with the coming of a warmer 
climate. 
In anthropology, in addition to large collections obtained 
from the living tribes, vocabularies, etc., the names and 
boundaries of all the tribes were obtained for the first time, 
the Eskimo were shown to exist on the Asiatic coast as im¬ 
migrants driven by war from America, and a very ancient 
confusion of these people with the Asiatic Chukchi was defi¬ 
nitely cleared up. The data obtained in regard to the various 
branches of the Eskimo stock brought welcome confirmation 
to the theory of Rink on the origin of this people—a theory 
which would probably have been by this time more widely 
known if it had been more sensational and less scientific. 
The patient examination of many village sitefe, shell-heaps, 
and middens throughout the Aleutian chain resulted in the 
discovery that the successive strata, judged by the imple¬ 
ments found in them, showed a gradual progress in culture 
from that of the lowest, a crude Eskimo type, to that of the 
uppermost stratum, which contained the evidences of Aleut 
culture of the type immediately before their subjugation by 
the Russians. This was, I believe, at that time the first in¬ 
stance in which the paleontologic method, if I may call it so, 
had been applied to the study of American shell-heaps. 
In biology, the first object of the work planned by Ken- 
nicott had been the determination of what constituted the 
fauna and flora, and from that knowledge the determination 
of the relations between the Asiatic and American assem¬ 
blies. This was accomplished in essentials, though it need 
