freely offered to
strangers by way of hospitality, showing a decided preference for white
men, whom they believe to beget better offspring than their own men. In
this regard one is soon convinced that salacious and prurient tastes are
not the exclusive privilege of people living outside of the Arctic
Circle; and observation favors the belief in the existence of pederasty
among Eskimo, if one may be allowed to judge from circumstances, which
it is not necessary to particularize, and from a word in their language
signifying the act.

Since morality is the last virtue acquired by man and the first one he
is likely to lose, it is not so surprising to find outrages on morals
among the undeveloped inhabitants of the north as it is to find them in
intelligent Christian communities among people whose moral sense ought
to be far above that of the average primitive man in view of their
associations and the variations that have been so frequently repeated
and accumulated by heredity; and where there is no hierarchy nor
established missionaries it is still more surprising to find any moral
sense at all among a people whose vague religious belief does not extend
beyond Shamanism or Animism, which to them explains the more strange and
striking natural phenomena by the hypothesis of direct spiritual agency.

It must not be understood by this, however, that these people have no
religion, as many travellers have erroneously believed; that would be
almost equivalent to stating that races of men exist without speech,
memory or knowledge of fire. A purely ethnological view of religion
which regards it as "the feeling which falls upon man in the presence of
the unknown," favors the idea that the children of the icy north have
many of the same feelings in this respect as those experienced by
ourselves under similar conditions, although there is doubtless a change
in us produced by more advanced thought and nicer feeling. On the other
hand, how many habits and ideas that are senseless and perfectly
unexplainable by the light of our present modes of life and thought can
be explained by similar customs and prejudices existing among these
distant tribes. Is there no fragment of primitive superstition or
residue of bygone ages in the supposed influence of the "Evil Eye" in
Ireland, or in the habit of "telling the bees" in Germany? Is there not
something of intellectual fossildom in the popular notion about Friday
and thirteen at table, and in th