During the season passed at Winter Island, which appears to have been a healthy one to the Esquimaux, we had little opportunity of becoming acquainted with the diseases to which they are subject. Our subsequent intercourse with a greater number of these people at Igloolik having unfortunately afforded more frequent and fatal instances of sickness among them, I here insert Mr. Edwards’s remarks on this subject:— “Exempted as these people are from a host of diseases usually ascribed to the vitiated habits of more civilised life, as well as from those equally numerous and more destructive ones engendered by the pestilential effluvia that float in the atmosphere of more favoured climes, the diversity of their maladies is, as might _à priori_ be inferred, very limited. But, unfortunately, that improvidence which is so remarkable in their kindred tribes is also with them proof against the repeated lessons of bitter experience they are doomed to endure. Alternate excesses and privations mark their progress through life, and consequent misery in one or another shape is an active agent in effecting as much mischief amongst them as the diseases above alluded to produce in other countries. The mortality arising from a few diseases and wretchedness combined, seems sufficient to check anything like a progressive increase of their numbers. The great proportion of deaths to births that occurred during the period of our intercourse with them has already been noticed. “It is doubtful in what proportion the mortality is directly occasioned by disease. Few perhaps die, in the strict sense of the term, a natural death. A married person of either sex rarely dies without leaving destitute a parent, a widow, or a helpless female infant. To be deprived of near relations is to be deprived of everything; such unfortunates are usually abandoned to their fate, and too generally perish. A widow and two or three children left under these circumstances were known to have died of inanition, from the neglect and apathy of their neighbours, who jeered at the commanders of our ships on the failure of their humane endeavours to save what the Esquimaux considered as worthless.