The Eskimo tongue requires a chapter to itself, for although it can boast of no literature—being until recently an unwritten language—it should have exceptional interest for the student of comparative philology. It is the speech of a primitive, untutored folk, yet its vocabulary is very large, its grammar complete, methodical and perfect, and its construction capable of expressing subtleties and combinations by inflection, unlike those of any tongue, springing from the well-known stocks of human speech. It is euphonic, agglutinative, and complex. Europeans find Eskimo difficult to acquire. The writer, like others, had largely to construct his own grammar when studying it. He spent many long hours, first with the young folk to get the purity of the sounds, then with the middle-aged men to arrive at correct idiom and fluency, then with the ancients to get at the folk lore of the tribe. Oftentimes their speech was merely a series of long and complicated gutturals, two hours of it being enough to make a man’s head spin for the rest of the day. But labour and pertinacity were at length rewarded; the language was mastered, and the minds of the arctic people revealed. The romance of this grammar consists in the fact that it has all been marshalled and classified, and reduced to a system which will bear comparison with even the classic tongues. Unless the first missionaries to the arctic had taken up this virgin and inchoate subject and handled it by the aid of the centuries of culture to which they were heir, Eskimo speech must have still remained a sealed book to the philologist, and—what is of far more importance—presented a Hill of Difficulty for years to all those who should come after them in the same ministry. With the aid of the grammars and dictionaries so patiently and thoughtfully compiled in the dark, unknown and bitter North, the would-be evangelist to-day may prepare himself for work among the Eskimo in the merest fraction of the time it took the first Danish envoys from civilisation. The original attempt was made by the well-known Danish pastor, Hans Egede, who went to Greenland with his wife in 1721, and lived there among the natives for many years. Eskimo was the mother-tongue of their son, born in the country as one of its own people. In time, this lad was sent to Denmark to study at the University of Copenhagen. On his return to Greenland, young Egede applied himself to the scientific study of the language he knew so intimately, and to the compilation of a grammar and a dictionary. His example was followed by the teachers who came after him, some of them being German linguists imbued with the meticulous love of learning and of intellectual conquest the task seemed preeminently to require. These tracked down and classified the many meanings of Eskimo inflection and expression, and perfected their system of interpretation. Hence, of course, the thoroughly Teutonic mould into which the syntax of the Eskimo tongue has been thrown.