All of the crooked knives in the collection are genuine implements which have been actually in use, and do not differ in type from the crooked knives in the Museum from the Mackenzie district, Kotzebue Sound, and other parts of Alaska. Similar knives appear to be used among the Siberian Eskimo and the Chukches, who have adopted their habits. Hooper (Tents, etc., p. 175), mentions “a small knife with a bent blade and a handle, generally made of the tip of a deer’s horn,” as one in general use at Plover Bay, and handled in the same skillful way as at Point Barrow.[N275] Among the Eskimo of the central region they are almost entirely unknown. The only mention I have seen of such tools is in Parry’s Second Voyage (p. 504), where he speaks of seeing at Iglulik “several open knives with crooked wooden handles,” which he thinks “must have been obtained by communication alongshore with Hudson Bay.” I can find no specimen, figure, or description of the sa´nat (“tool”), _the_ tool par excellence of the Greenlanders, except the following definition in Kleinschmidt’s “Grønlandsk Ordbog”: “2. Specially a narrow, long-hafted knife, which is sharpened on one side and slightly curved at the tip (and which is a Greenlander’s chief tool).” This seems to indicate that this knife, so common in the West, is equally common in Greenland.[N276] [Footnote N275: Lisiansky also mentions “a small crooked knife” (Voyage, p. 181), as one of the tools used in Kadiak in 1805.] [Footnote N276: A specimen has lately been received at the National Museum. It is remarkably like the Indian knife in pattern.] [Illustration: FIG. 117.--Crooked knives, flint bladed. 4/9 1/3] Whether these people used crooked knives before the introduction of iron is by no means certain, though not improbable. Fig. 117_a_, No. 89633 [1196], from Utkiavwĭñ, is a knife made by imbedding a flake of gray flint in the lower edge of a haft of reindeer antler, of the proper shape and curvature for a mĭdlĭñ handle. The haft is soiled and undoubtedly old, while the flaked surfaces of the flint do not seem fresh, and the edge shows slight nicks, as if it had been used. Had this knife been followed by others equally genuine looking, I should have no hesitation in pronouncing it a prehistoric knife, and the ancestor of the present steel one. The fact, however, that its purchase gave rise to the manufacture of a host of flint knives all obviously new and more and more clumsily made, until we refused to buy any more, leads me to suspect that it was fabricated with very great care from old material, and skillfully soiled by the maker.