Though consumption and scrofula are the two great indigenous sources of disease and death among the natives, yet there is still a list—quite a long one—of other ills, such as paralysis, inflammatory rheumatism and peritonitis, fits, and an abrupt ending of life in the middle-aged, called most graphically “general debility.” As might be inferred from the method and exigencies of aboriginal life in Alaska, these natives do not survive to any great age; rarely, indeed, will an authenticated case of the full limit of sixty years be recorded or observed—an overwhelming majority of them are old at thirty-five and forty. When a man or a woman in a settlement rounds the fiftieth year of his or her life, a noted example of the tribe is afforded; but should this age be attained, and the man then be free from rheumatic troubles or the death-grasp of scrofulous or pulmonic disease, he is sure to be afflicted with injured and defective vision, if not totally blind; the glint of snow and the intensely smoky interiors of every style of native dwelling so affect the eyes of these people that those organs of sight, in the middle-aged, are seldom without signs of decay—showing some one of the various stages of granular ophthalmia, as a rule. Snow-blindness can be remedied and its pain abated by the use of peculiar goggles, which the savages know well how to make and use, but the greater evil of smoke-poison to the optic nerve is not obviated at all by any action on their part, though it would be easy so to do. They actually seem determined to live on so as to live as wretchedly in the future as they have in the past. Another singular characteristic of these Alaskan savages is the fact that none of the many tribes have any medicine whatever; nor have they any knowledge, so far as we can find out, of any medicinal herb or mineral, and this again is the most extraordinary item of it all. Every less or great indisposition is treated by a universal resort to the sweat-bath; this is the sole specific, and this is the only relief, except when the shaman is called in to worry the last hours of the unhappy patient to death, or, perhaps, in rare cases, to prolong his wretched existence for a longer period, by stimulating an undue or extra nervous tension, which then causes, at times, the usually languid and resigned sufferer to rally, as it were, before the flame flickers out. Truly these people are predestinarians; they are wonderful in their patience when suffering long and acutely, as they lie stretched out or squatted in their gloomy, noisome hovels.