I had further the good fortune to secure, through the kindness of Reverend Baldwin, two handsome and remarkable knives from fossil mammoth ivory. These knives were said to have been made recently by the Eskimo of the Seward Peninsula. They are shown in Plate 28. They each bear on the handle a nicely carved crouching animal figure. With them are shown, somewhat more reduced, two probably ceremonial knives from Old Mexico; and also the handle of a late palaeolithic poignard from France, illustrated by De Quatrefages.[58] Regarding the latter form we read the following in Mortillet:[59] "D'autres poignées de poignard, faites dans des données pratiques et artistiques analogues, ont été recueillies dans diverses collections. Les plus remarquables sont deux poignées en ivoire trouvées par Peccadeau de l'Isle, à Bruniquel. L'une se rattachait à la lame, comme dans la pièce précédente, par le train de derrière; l'autre, au contraire, par la tête." Knives with similar crouching animal figures on the handle are being made by the King Islanders. Here, evidently, is one more interesting problem for the archeologists. The art shown by these objects, the conventionalization, and especially the decorations, appear to show affinity on one hand to deeper eastern Asia and on the other to those of the American northwest coast and even lower. This may prove to mean much or little. The fact that these specimens establish beyond question is that at one time and up to a few hundreds of years ago there existed in the lands of the northern Bering Sea native art superior to that existing there later and at the present, and comparable with the best native Siberian or American. The meaning of this fact seems to me to be of importance. The evidence suggests, aside from other things, that American cultural developments may after all not have been purely local or even American, but that they may, in part at least, have been initiated or carried from Asia. In view of these and other recent developments it seems rational to consider that America may have been peopled by far eastern Asiatic groups that not merely carried with them differences in language and physique but also in some cases relatively high cultural developments. But these for the present are mere hypotheses. There is no definite indication as yet that the people of the high fossil ivory art in the northern Bering Sea and neighboring parts were any others than the ancestors of the Eskimo. The skeletal remains from these regions, as will be shown later, rather support this view. But those ancestors may not yet have represented the characteristic present type of the people. Here, too, nothing definite can be said before the results of sufficient scientific excavations become available. FOOTNOTES: