[Illustration: Style of personal ornamentation adopted by the women of Saint Lawrence island.] Why the ancient habit of tattooing should prevail so extensively among some of the primitive tribes as it does, for instance, in the Polynesian islands and some parts of Japan, and we may say as a survival of a superstitious practice of paganism among sailors and others, is a psychological problem difficult to solve. Whether it be owing to perversion of the sexual instinct, which is not unlikely, or to other cause, it is not proposed to discuss. Be that as it may, the prevalence of the habit among the Eskimo is confined to the female sex, who are tattooed on arriving at the age of puberty. The women of Saint Lawrence island, in addition to lines on the nose, forehead and chin, have uniformly a figure of strange design on the cheeks, which is suggestive of cabalistic import. It could not be ascertained, however, whether such is the case. The lines drawn on the chin were exactly like the ones I have seen on Moorish women in Morocco. Another outlandish attempt at adornment was witnessed at Cape Blossom in a woman who wore a bunch of colored beads suspended from the septum of her nose. These habits, however, hardly seem so revolting as the use of the labret by the "Mazinka" men on the American coast, of whom it is related that a sailor seeing one of them for the first time, and observing the slit in the lower lip through which the native thrust his tongue, thought he had discovered a man with two mouths. The use of the labret, like many of the attempts at primitive ornamentation, is very old, its use having been traced by Dall along the American coast from the lower part of Chili to Alaska. Persons fond of tracing, vestiges of savage ornamentation amid intellectual advancement and aesthetic sensibility far in advance of the primitive man, may observe in the wearers of bangles and earrings the same tendency existing in a differentiated form. DIVERSIONS. I doubt whether Shakespeare's dictum in regard to music holds good when applied to the Eskimo, for they have but little music in their souls, and among no people is there such a noticeable absence of "treason, stratagem and spoil." A rude drum and a monotonous chant, consisting only of the fundamental note and minor third, are the only things in the way of music among the more remote settlements of which I have any knowledge. Mrs. Micawber's singing has been described as the table-beer of acoustics. Eskimo singing is something more. The beer has become flat by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler, experimented on his instrument with a view to seeing what effect music would have on the "savage breast," but his best efforts at rendering "Madame Angot" and the "Grande Duchesse" were wasted before an unsympathetic audience, who showed as little appreciation of his performance as some people do when listening to Wagner's "Music of the Future."