Where they have come in contact with civilization their musical taste is more developed. At Saint Michael's I was told that some of their songs are so characteristic that it is much to be regretted that some of them cannot be bottled up in a phonograph and sent to a musical composer. On the coast of Siberia I heard an Eskimo boy sing correctly a song he had learned while on board a whaling vessel, and on several of the Aleutian islands the natives play the accordeon quite well; have music-boxes, and even whistle strains from "Pinafore." From music to dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the latter be regarded in a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the opposite sex or as the expression of joyous excitement. This manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam and David indulged in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and which old Homer says is the sweetest and most perfect of human enjoyments, is a pastime much in vogue among the Eskimo, and it required but little provocation to start a dance at any time on the _Corwin's_ decks when a party happened to be on board. The dancing, however, had not the cadence of "a wave of the sea," nor was there the harmony of double rotation circling in a series of graceful curves to strains like those of Strauss or Gungl. On the contrary, there was something saltatorial and jerky about all the dancing I saw both among the men and women. It is the custom at some of their gatherings, after the hunting season is over, for the men to indulge in a kind of terpsichorean performance, at the same time relating in Homeric style the heroic deeds they have done. At other times the women do all the dancing. Being stripped to the waist they are more _decollete_ than our beauties at the German, and the men take the part of spectators only in this choreographical performance. ART INSTINCT. The aptitude shown by Eskimo in carving and drawing has been noticed by all travellers among them. Some I have met with show a degree of intelligence and appreciation in regard to charts and pictures scarcely to be expected from such a source. From walrus ivory they sculpture figures of birds, quadrupeds, marine animals, and even the human form, which display considerable individuality notwithstanding their crude delineation and imperfect detail. I have also seen a fair carving of a whale in plumbago. Evidences of decoration are sometimes seen on their canoes, on which are found rude pictures of walruses, etc., and they have a kind of picture-writing, by means of which they commemorate certain events in their lives, just as Sitting Bull has done in an autobiography that may be seen at the Army Medical Museum.