Some tribes adopt the crow, some the hawk, and some the bear or the whale, as their distinctive tribal emblem. The poles are carved from bottom to top, averaging thirty or forty feet in height,—though some are nearly a hundred feet high,—and from three to four feet in diameter, the height also signifying the importance of the individual, that is, his social grade or standing in the tribe. Some of the carvings are mythological, for these people have an oral mythology of the most fabulous character, which has been handed down from father to son for many centuries. The carvings on the coffin-boxes, though often elaborate, to a white man’s eye are meaningless. As we have said, when a chief dies, some valuable personal effects are always deposited with his body in the coffin, and one would suppose that such objects were safe from pilfering fingers of even strangers; yet these articles are constantly offered for sale, and are eagerly purchased by curio-hunters who come hither from various parts of this country. The aborigines of Alaska are divided into various sub-tribes, such as Hooniahs, Tongas, Auks, Kasa-ans, Haidas, Sitkas, Chinooks, Chilcats, and so on. Ivan Petroff, who was sent by the United States Government to Alaska in 1880, as special agent of the census, divides the native population of the Territory as follows:— FIRST.—The Innuit or Eskimo race, which predominates in numbers and covers the littoral margin of all Alaska from the British boundary on the Arctic to Norton Sound, the Lower Yukon, and Kuskoquin, Bristol Bay, the Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak Island, mixing in, also, at Prince William Sound. SECOND.—The Indians proper spread over the vast interior in the north, reaching down to the seaboard at Cook’s Inlet and the mouth of the Copper River, and lining the coast from Mount St. Elias southward to the boundary and peopling the Alexander Archipelago. THIRD.—The Aleutian race, extending from the Shumagin Islands westward to Attoo,—the Ultima Thule of this country,—whom Petroff terms the Christian inhabitants. These last certainly conform most fully to all the outward practices of civilization and universally recognize the Greek Church.