The Esquimaux are celebrated as gluttons. This, however, is but one half the fact. They can eat, they can also fast, indefinitely. For a week they gorge themselves without exercise, and have no indigestion; for a week, exercising vigorously, they live on air, frozen air, too, and experience no exhaustion. Last winter half a dozen appeared at Square-Island Harbor, sent out their trained dogs, drove in a herd of deer, and killed thirteen. They immediately encamped, gathered fuel, made fires, began to cook and eat,--ate themselves asleep; then waked to cook, eat, and sleep again, until the thirteenth deer had vanished. Thereupon they decamped, to travel probably hundreds of miles, and endure days on days of severe labor, before tasting, or more than tasting, food again. The same explanation serves. These physical capabilities, not to be attained by the post-Adamite man, belong to the primitive races, as to hawks, gulls, and beasts of prey. The stomach of the Esquimaux is his cellar, as that of the camel is a cistern, wherein he lays up stores. _August 4._--This day we sailed away from Hopedale, heading homeward,--leaving behind a race of men who were, to me a problem to be solved, if possible. All my impressions of them are summed in the epithet, often repeated, pre-Adamite. In applying, this, I affirm nothing respecting their physical origin. All that is to me an open question, to be closed when I have more light than now. It may be, that, as Mr. Agassiz maintains, they were created originally just as they are. For this hypothesis much may be said, and it may be freely confessed that in observing them I felt myself pressed somewhat toward the acceptance of it as a definite conclusion. It may be that they have become what they are by slow modification of a type common to all races,--that, with another parentage, they have been made by adoption children of the icy North, whose breath has chilled in their souls the deeper powers of man's being. This it will be impossible for me to deny until I have investigated more deeply the influence of physical Nature upon man, and learned more precisely to what degree the traditions of a people, constituting at length a definite social atmosphere, may come to penetrate and shape their individual being. I do not pronounce; I wait and keep the eyes open. Doubtless they are God's children; and knowing this, one need not be fretfully impatient, even though vigilantly earnest, to know the rest. In naming them pre-Adamite I mean two things. First, that they have stopped short of ideas, that is, of the point where human history begins. They belong, not to spiritual or human, but to outward and physical Nature. There they are a great success.