Here, too, is the accustomed multiplicity of tribes, each with its idiom, and sometimes differing in religious superstition, especially on the grave question of descent from the dog or the crow. There is also a prevailing usage for the men of one tribe to choose wives from another tribe, when the tribal character of the mother attaches to the offspring, which is another illustration of the Law of Slavery, _Partus sequitur ventrem_. The late departure from this usage is quoted by the old men as a sufficient reason for the mortality which has afflicted the Kenaians, although a better reason is found in the ravages of the small-pox, unhappily introduced by the Russians. In 1838, ten thousand persons on the coast are reported victims to this disease. (4.) Last of the four races are the _Koloschians_, numbering about 4,000, who occupy the coast and islands from the mouth of the Copper River to the southern boundary of Russian America, making about sixteen settlements. They belong to an Indian group extending as far south as the Straits of Fuca, and estimated to contain 25,000 souls. La Pérouse, after considerable experience of the aborigines on the Atlantic coast, asserts that those he saw here are not Esquimaux.[79] The name seems to be of Russian origin, and is equivalent to Indian. Here again is another variety of language, and as many separate nations. Near Mount St. Elias are the Yakutats, who are the least known; then come the Thlinkits, occupying the islands and coast near Sitka, and known in Oregon under the name of Stikines; and then again we have the Kygans, who, beginning on Russian territory, overlap Queen Charlotte’s Island, beneath the British flag. All these, with their subdivisions, are Koloschians; but every tribe or nation has four different divisions, derived from four different animals, the whale, the eagle, the crow, and the wolf, which are so many heraldic devices, marking distinct groups.