These craft, an important and necessary factor in the hunting lives of most Eskimo tribal groups, have long attracted the attention of explorers and ethnologists, and many specimens have been deposited in American and European museums. Like bark canoes, they have unfortunately proved difficult to preserve under conditions of museum exhibit. As a result, examples of once numerous types have become so damaged that they no longer give an accurate impression of their original form and appearance, and some have so deteriorated that they have had to be destroyed. Among the latter may have been examples of types long since out of use. One such type was represented by a single kayak, now destroyed; as a result this form has become extinct, and only a poor scale model remains to give a highly unsatisfactory representation of it. In 1946 the late Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was then projecting his _Encyclopedia Arctica_, asked me to prepare for it a technical article on the Arctic skin boat. The decision of the sponsors to discontinue the publication, after the first volume had appeared, prevented appearance of the article, but in 1958, through the kindness of Dr. Stefansson, it was returned to the author for publication by the U.S. National Museum. I have since revised and added to it, after receiving criticisms and suggestions from Henry B. Collins, of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, from John Heath, and from other authorities.[2] [2] For their aid to him the author takes this occasion to extend particular thanks. He also thanks his Smithsonian Institution colleagues in the Division of Ethnology, U.S. National Museum; members of the staffs of The American Museum of Natural History and The Museum of the American Indian in New York, of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and of the Stefansson Library at Dartmouth; and the Washington State Historical Society and Museum, and others in the Northwest who gave both aid and encouragement. The object of the study, as will be seen, was to measure the skin boats and to make scale drawings that would permit the construction of a replica exact in details of appearance, form, construction, and also in working behavior. Special regard was given to the diversity of types with respect to hull form and construction methods; but questions of ethnic trends, tribal migrations, and such matters, being outside the scope of the study, were not considered. Wherever possible, full-size craft were used as the source, but where only fragments existed, these had to be supplemented by reference to and interpretation of models of the same type. In spite of the difficulty of locating skin boats of some Arctic areas, examples of most of those mentioned by explorers since 1875 have been found and recorded, so that, as far as possible, every distinctive tribal type of Arctic skin boat which in 1946 was represented by museum exhibits in the eastern United States is represented in plans here. [Illustration: Figure 157