VILLAGE OF KASA-AN, ALASKA.—It will doubtless be a surprise to many persons not familiar with the conditions of the Alaskan Indians to observe that their houses are usually quite substantially built of frame or wood. We generally think of Indians as living in wigwams or huts, but in the case of the Alaskans they were for many years previous to the purchase of that country by our government under the influence of Russia, and are therefore partly civilized and somewhat advanced in the modern ways of living. But they still retain their old superstition, as shown by the totem poles in front of their houses. These poles are carved and mounted with rude representations of birds, beasts and reptiles, which are intended to give notice to the public that the spirits of the deceased ancestors of the occupants of the houses have entered into the living counterparts of these rude carvings, and that any indignities offered to them will be vigorously and promptly resented. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: CHRISTINE FALLS, ALICE BAY, ALASKA.] The destruction of the Antediluvians who lived before the Ice Age set in was accomplished much further back; the date 6,000 B. C. represents the end of the Ice Age, not its beginning. How it was that ice submerged the world no one seems to be exactly able to say, but a great deal of valuable information has been obtained by the geological research of the present century. Before this devastating deluge of ice set in— “Trees reigned without interruption, in north temperate and Polar regions, throughout the vast expanse of tertiary time. Palms and cycads then sprang up in the room of oaks and beeches in England; turtles and crocodiles haunted English rivers and estuaries; lions, elephants, and hyenas roamed at large over English dry land. Anthropoid apes lived in Germany and France, fig and cinnamon trees flourished in Dantzic; in Greenland, up to seventy degrees of latitude, magnolias bloomed, and vines ripened their fruit; while in Spitzbergen, and even in Grinnell Land, within little more than eight degrees of the pole, swamp-cypresses and walnuts, cedars, limes, planes and poplars grew freely.”