A FRAGMENT OF HUMAN SKELETON FROM 
NORTH LATITUDE 81° 42’, 
‘BY 
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 toa 
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. 
