The writer well remembers an account given to him one winter’s night by an aged hunter, of some stores left by a party of the early explorers. It was during a journey along the south coast of Baffin Land, and shelter had been sought in the snow house of an ancient Eskimo couple. The old man was grandfather of the tribe, and had been a noted hunter in his day, and had fought many a battle with the savage elements and more savage beasts of the wild. It was after the evening meal. The old fellow and his equally old wife had been warmed with some steaming coffee liberally sweetened with molasses, and regaled with ship’s biscuit. The pipes of both had been filled, and were drawing well. Their bronzed, lined faces, lined like the shell of a walnut, shone with contentment, they huddled on their sleeping bench and smoked and dreamed of the strenuous past. A question or two soon elicited a flood of guttural reminiscences. The old hunter pictured himself as a youth again, and went over the exploits of his prime, prompted now and again by the crone at his side, in a shrewd expectation of further acceptable items. Among other things, he told of the various “dumps” or “caches” of stores made by the white men who came long ago, remembering exactly the localities and the contents of every one. Some had been broken into long since by wandering Eskimo; some had been destroyed by bears; some remained intact. His memory was as exact and reliable as if he had seen the things but a week—instead of a lifetime—before. Perhaps it was an echo, all that time afterwards, of the Franklin tragedy. These primitive Eskimo inhabit the great archipelago which stretches polewards from the northern shores of the Canadian continent, from Greenland on the east to Alaska and the Aleutian islands on the extreme west. There is, too, a settlement of Eskimo beyond Behring Strait. Some ethnographers hold them to be of purely American origin with no affinities in Asia, however Mongolian they may be in appearance. Dr. Rink believes in an Alaskan origin for the Eskimo, as opposed to an Asian, but another authority, Dr. Boas, thinks the solution of this racial problem might be obtained by means of an archæological research on the coast of the Behring Sea.