Pen, ink and paper, it may be noted, are innovations of the new civilisation. Prior to the advent of the white man the only idea and the only means of calligraphy the Eskimo had was the etching on ivory or bone. Many vigorous and spirited drawings exist of hunting or other scenes, scratched on blade or handle, and sharply bitten in, black and clear, by rubbing with soot from the lamps. It is not remarkable that a knowledge of writing and reading should have spread among the people in this way, for the Eskimo are avid of instruction, and eagerly avail themselves of any opportunity of being taught. Where Christianity itself has gained a footing it has been largely through the instrumentality of some among them who have come in contact with missionaries, and passed on to others all they had seen and heard. One of the most puzzling aspects of Eskimo is its “agglutinative” character. The words all run together. All the parts of speech may be joined to the verbal root and then conjugated in its various moods and tenses, so that the word finally produced by this process may be sixty or more syllables long. Students find the principal difficulty, not so much in building up and saying these peculiar words, but in correctly understanding what the natives say. The following lengthy remark will illustrate three things: first, a characteristic mood and tense of the verb “to flee”; secondly, the phonetic characters used; and, thirdly, the composite nature of the word. 1. Kemâyomaneangelara = I shall not wish to flee from him. 2. ᑭᒪᔪᒪᓂᐊᖏᓚᕋ 3. Ke-mâ-yo-ma-ne-â-ng-ge-lâ-ra. The Eskimo tongue has a full complement of the parts of speech. There is no definite article, but the numeral adjective one, attousik, takes its place; e.g., attousik angoot, a man, i.e., one man. There is no form to express gender. Sex is distinguished by the word “man” or “woman” (really male or female) added to another noun; as kingmuk, a dog; arngnak, a woman; angoot, a man. Kingmuk arngnak, a female dog; kingmuk angoot, a male dog. In many cases where English admits of only one word for an animal, Eskimo has several. A deer is a deer in English all the year round; in Eskimo it has a different name for its growth or habits at certain seasons, as in the fawning period, etc. The noun plays an important part in the sentence on account of the various affixes which may be attached. It is inflected for number, and for no less than nine cases (rendered by prepositions in translation); it draws possessive pronouns and some adjectives to itself as a magnet draws iron filings; it has moreover a transitive and an emphatic form. At the risk of writing a chapter which might be taken from an Eskimo Primer, we venture to give examples of some of these intricacies of the snow folks’ strange speech, since whatever else it may be, this can scarcely be called a hackneyed subject! So the transitive form of the noun is used when it is the subject of a transitive verb:—