The original Eskimo stock is now probably extinct. In language and physique, many of the present day tribes exhibit traits of racial admixture with the Red Indians. This has occurred in such junction areas as Labrador and Alaska, and has given rise to the probably quite fallacious idea of an Indian origin for the Arctic race. This error could not be made in Eskimo lands proper. Those who have lived for long years with both Indian and Eskimo, and are intimately acquainted with the language, legends, and characteristics of both peoples, hold strongly to the opinion that they are entirely distinct. Personally, the writer would incline to the belief that the Innooeet are of Mongolian stock. He has heard on good authority of a pure Eskimo sailor being addressed by a Chinaman in Chinese, under the impression that he was speaking to a fellow-countryman. It is conjectured that in the remote past some Mongols may have reached the sea coast in the extreme east, and have crossed by boat from island to island, and so to the Arctics of North America. Increasing there in numbers, they presently dispossessed the aboriginals—the “Tooneet”—and drove them to the “back of the Arctic beyond.” But of this more when we come to Eskimo legends. Undoubtedly the Eskimo are linked, if not by blood certainly by custom, to the Arctic peoples of Siberia, to the Lapps and Finns of northern Europe. In historic times they mixed with the Danes and Norsemen. They are not numerically very strong. Forty thousand may possibly total the nation, and of those 12,000 are in Greenland, and rather more in Alaska, leaving some 13,000 souls scattered along the shores of Baffin Land, Melville Peninsula, Boothia, Victoria Island, Banks Island and the rest of the bleak, fragmented continent. It is in Baffin Land, in Boothia, and Victoria that the pure Eskimo race is found. Elsewhere the type is extremely mixed. It is to be deplored, too, that where the people have been in contact with vicious and unscrupulous whites, traders, sailors, and the rest, the introduction not only of alien blood but of the diseases of “civilisation” have here and there threatened extinction to whole tribes.