to America, and that by this means the race of cave-men
was able to extend itself all the way from Norway and
Sweden to the northern coasts of America. In support of
this view he points to the strangely ingenious and artistic
drawings of the Eskimos. These drawings are made on ivory
and bone, and are so like the ancient bone-pictures found
among the relics of the cave-men of Europe that they can
scarcely be distinguished.

The theory is only a conjecture. It is certain that at
one time the Eskimo race extended much farther south than
it did when the white men came to America; in earlier
days there were Eskimos far south of Hudson Bay, and
perhaps even south of the Great Lakes.

As a result of their situation the Eskimos led a very
different life from that of the Indians to the south.
They must rely on fishing and hunting for food. In that
almost treeless north they had no wood to build boats or
houses, and no vegetables or plants to supply them either
with food or with the materials of industry. But the very
rigour of their surroundings called forth in them a
marvellous ingenuity. They made boats of seal skins
stretched tight over walrus bones, and clothes of furs
and of the skins and feathers of birds. They built winter
houses with great blocks of snow put together in the form
of a bowl turned upside down. They heated their houses
by burning blubber or fat in dish-like lamps chipped out
of stones. They had, of course, no written literature.
They were, however, not devoid of art. They had legends