The fur-bearing animals of Alaska have been greatly reduced in numbers during the last twenty-five years: the caribou and the moose have, to a marked degree, been killed or driven to remote regions; the larger whales, on account of overcapture by American whalers, have become scarce; the sea-lion and the walrus are nearly extinct; the fur-seal, of more importance to the Aleutians than the Innuits, is rapidly approaching extinction. Thus in many ways the food supply is greatly decreased. Recourse to agriculture is impossible. The one redeeming feature of the white man's aggression is the introduction of the domesticated reindeer from Asia and Lapland. With reindeer, the salmon, not as yet depleted in the streams emptying into Bering Sea, the white whale, the hair-seal, not as yet of commercial value, the countless birds of summer, the berries of the tundra, etc., the Innuits can survive, maintain their manhood, and become useful to civilization in certain ways if the curse of drink and the spread of imported diseases could be stopped. Such a change, however, for various reasons, is not to be hoped for. It may perhaps be said that the influence of missionaries, and, what is vastly more important, the work of the school-teacher, has opened to these children of the cold northern land a way to civilization, but the results up to the present time are not reassuring. The census of 1890 showed that the Innuits of Alaska numbered 13,045. In the census of 1900 a separate enumeration of Eskimos and Indians was not made. The dismal picture I have been compelled to sketch of the present condition and future prospects of the Innuits of Alaska, in order to indicate their status at the opening of the twentieth century, applies also with variations in detail and some hopeful signs to a large majority of the other aboriginal tribes of North America. _The Aleutians._--The aboriginal inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands are termed Aleuts or Aleutians, a word of obscure and perhaps foreign derivation. As stated above, they belong to the Eskimo family, but are more widely separated from the parent stock than any other of its constituent tribes. Evidence advanced by W. H. Dall tends to show that they are of American continental origin. At the time of the first coming of the Russians, about 1750, they were at war with the Kaniagmuts, who inhabited the greater part of the Alaskan peninsula and were the nearest tribe of the Innuits.