Can these cave-dwellers be identified with any people now living on the face of the earth? or are they as completely without representatives as their extinct contemporaries, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros? Absolute certainty we cannot hope to obtain on the point, but the cumulative evidence enables an answer to be given which is probably true. Along the American shore of the great Arctic Ocean, in the region of everlasting snow, dwell the Eskimos, living by hunting and fishing, speaking the same language, and using the same implements from the Straits of Behring on the west, to Greenland on the east. Their implements and weapons, brought home by the arctic explorers, enable us to institute a comparison with those found in the palæolithic caves. The harpoons in the Ashmolean collection at Oxford, brought over by Captain Beechey and Lieut. Harding from West Georgia, as well as those in the British Museum, are almost identical in shape and design with those from the caves of Aquitaine and Kent’s Hole; the only difference being that some of the latter have grooved barbs. The heads of the fowling and fishing spears, darts, and arrows, as well as the form of their bases for insertion into the shafts, are also identical (Fig. 122), as may be seen from a comparison of Fig. 122 with Figs. 99 and 114. The curiously carved instrument, Fig. 123, which the Eskimos use for straightening their arrows is variously ornamented with designs of animals, analogous to those cut on the reindeer antlers in Aquitaine; and if it be compared with the so-called “bâton de commandement,” Fig. 121, it will be seen, that the latter also was probably intended for the same purpose; the difference in the shape of the hole in the two figured specimens being also observable in the series of Eskimos arrow-straighteners in the British Museum, and being largely due to friction by use. Many of the implements are the same in form. An Eskimos stone scraper for preparing skins, or plane for smoothing wood, is represented in Fig. 124, which is inserted in a handle of fossil mammoth ivory, obtained from the frozen ice-cliffs on the shores of the Arctic sea. If it be compared with Fig. 107 from the caves, it will be seen to be of the same pattern. It is indeed not a little singular, that the handle in which it is imbedded should have been formed out of the tusks of the same species of elephant as that which was depicted by the palæolithic hunter (see Fig. 120), in the south of France. [Illustration: FIG. 124.--Eskimos Plane or Scraper (1/1). (Lartet and Christy.)] Some of the Eskimos lance-heads of stone in the British Museum are of the same type as that figured from the caves of the Dordogne (Fig. 108).