he sea to the height of 2,100 feet, consists
of granite, with lava here and there, and the indications point to the
overflow of a vast ice sheet from the north, evidences of which are seen
in the trend of the ridges on the top, and the form of the narrow
peninsula joining the cliff to the mainland. From the summit of the cape
the Diomedes, Fairway Rock, and the American coast are so easily seen
that the view once taken would dispel any doubts as to the possibility
of the aboriginal denizens of America having crossed over from Asia, and
it would require no such statement to corroborate the opinion as that of
an officer of the Hudson Bay Company, then resident in Ungava bay, who
relates that in 1839 an Eskimo family crossed to Labrador from the
northern shore of Hudson's straits on a raft of driftwood. Natives cross
and recross Bering straits to-day on the ice and in primitive skin
canoes, not unlike Cape Cod dories, which have not been improved in
construction since the days of prehistoric man. Indeed, the primitive
man may be seen at East cape almost as he was thousands of years ago.
Evolution and development, with the exception of firearms, seem to have
halted at East cape. The place, with its cave-like dwellings and
skin-clad inhabitants, among whom the presence of white men creates the
same excitement as the advent of a circus among the colored population
of Washington, makes one fancy that he is in some grand prehistoric
museum, and that he has gone backward in time several thousand years in
order to get there.

While we may do something towards tracing the effects of physical agents
on the Eskimo back into the darkness that antedates history, yet his
geographical origin and his antiquity are things concerning which we
know but little. Being subjects of first-class interest, deserving of
grave study and so vast in themselves, they cannot be touched upon here
except incidentally. Attempting to study them is like following the
labyrinthal ice mazes of the Arctic in quest of the North Pole.

We may, however, venture the assertion that the Eskimo is of autocthonic
origin in Asia, but is not autocthonous in America. His arrival there
and subsequent migrations are beyond the reach of history or tradition.
Others, though, contend from the analogy of some of the western tribes
of Brazil, who are identical in feature to the Chinese, that the Eskimo
may have come from South America; and the fashion of wearing labrets,
which