In one of the acts of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages" the Eskimo plays a very unimportant _role_. Perhaps in no other race is the combative instinct less predominant; in none is quarrelling, fierceness of disposition, and jealousy more conspicuously absent, and in none does the desire for the factitious renown of war exist in a more rudimentary and undeveloped state. Perhaps the constant fight with cold and hunger is a compensation which must account for the absence of such unmitigated evils as war, taxes, complex social organization and hierarchy among the curious people of the icy north. The pursuits of peace and of simple patriarchal lives, notwithstanding the fact of much in connection therewith that is wretched, and forbidding to a civilized man, seem to beget in these people a degree of domestic tranquility and contentment which, united to their light-hearted and cheery disposition, is an additional reason for believing the sum of human happiness to be constant throughout the world. MENTAL CHARACTER AND CAPACITY. The intellectual character of the Eskimo, judging from the information which various travellers have furnished, as well as my personal knowledge, produces more than a feeble belief in the possibility of their being equal to anything they choose to take an interest in learning. The Eskimo is not "muffled imbecility," as some one has called him, nor is he dull and slow of understanding, as Vitruvius describes the northern nation to be "from breathing a thick air"--which, by the way, is thin, elastic and highly ozonized--nor is he, according to Dr. Beke, "degenerated almost to the lowest state compatible with the retention of rational endowments." On the contrary, the old Greenland missionary, Hans Egede, writes: "I have found some of them witty enough and of good capacity;" Sir Martin Frobisher says they are "in nature very subtle and sharp-witted;" Sir Edward Parry, while extolling their honesty and good nature, adds, "Indeed, it required no long acquaintance to convince us that art and education might easily have made them equal or superior to ourselves;" Sauer tells of a woman who learned to speak Russian fluently in rather less than twelve months, and Beechy and others have acknowledged the intelligent help they have received from Eskimo in making their explorations.