The teeth of the Eskimos are regular, but from the nature of their food and from their practice of preparing hides by chewing, are worn down almost to the gums at an early age. Their hair is straight, black, and coarse; the men have it closely cut on the crown, like that of a Capuchin friar, leaving a band about two inches broad, which gradually increases in length towards the back of the neck; the women merely part their hair in the middle, and, if wealthy, ornament it with strings of beads. The possession of a beard is very rare, but a slight moustache is not infrequent. Their complexion, if divested of its usual covering of dirt, can hardly be called dark; on the contrary, it displays a healthy, rosy tint, and were it not for the custom of tattooing the chin some of the girls might be called pretty, even in the European acceptation of the term. 1861, Richardson:[73] The Eskimos are remarkably uniform in physical appearance throughout their far-stretching area, there being perhaps no other nation in the world so unmixed in blood. Frobisher's people were struck with their resemblance in features and general aspect to the Samoyeds and their physiognomy has been held by all ethnologists to be of the Mongolian or Tartar type. Doctor Latham calls the Samoyeds Hyperborean Mongolidae, and the Eskimos he ranges among the American Mongolidae, embracing in the latter group all the native races of the New World. The Mongol type of countenance is, however, more strongly reproduced in the Eskimos than in the red Indians--the conterminous Tinné tribes differing greatly in their features, and the more remote Indians still more. Generally the Eskimos have broadly egg-shaped faces with considerable prominence of the rounded cheeks caused by the arching of the cheek bones, but few or no angular projections even in the old people, whose features are always much weather beaten and furrowed. The greatest breadth of the face is just below the eyes, the forehead tapers upward, ending narrowly, but not acutely, and in like manner the chin is a blunt cone; both the forehead and the chin recede, the egg outline showing in profile, though not so strongly, as in a front view. The nose is broad and depressed, but not in all, some individuals having prominent noses, yet almost all have wider nostrils than Europeans. The eyes have small and oblique apertures like the Chinese, and from frequent attacks of ophthalmia and the effect of lamp smoke in their winter habitations adults of both sexes are disfigured by excoriated or ulcerated eyelids. The sight of these people is, from its constant exercise, extremely keen, and the habit of bringing the eyelids nearly together when looking at distant objects has in all the grown males produced a striking cluster of furrows radiating from the outer corners of each eye over the temples.