the study of any race of man,
even the most primitive, without some knowledge of all the long history
of man, of all the long history of man's thought, man's methods, man's
strivings, man's accomplishments, man's failures, is to come so ill
equipped that no just conclusions are likely to be reached. Your
exclusive "scientist"--and such are most of them to-day--may be
competent to deal with circles and triangles, with wheels and levers
with cells and glands, with germs and bacilli and micro-organisms
generally, with magnetos and dynamos, with all the heavenly host if you
like, but he has no equipment to deal with man! Somatic anthropology in
particular tends to assume in some quarters such an overimportance that
one falls back upon the recollection that the original head measurers
were hatters and that all hatters are proverbially mad. The occupation
would seem to carry the taint.

It was with much pleasure that I was able to hold out hope to Chief
Isaac of the mission and the school he desired so earnestly for his
people. It must not be supposed that all of them were in the completely
unevangelised state which has been dwelt upon, that to all of them the
teaching of those two full days was novel; some of them, like the chief
himself, had been across to the Yukon long ago and still bore some trace
of the early labours of the Church of England missionaries to whom this
region of Alaska that adjoins Canada is so much indebted. Others had
once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the occasion of a visit from our
missionary at Eagle, and had received instruction from him. But there
were many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary, never
had any teaching, to whom it was wholly new save as they might have
picked up some inkling from those that had been more fortunate.

[Illustration: THE TANANA CROSSING.]

[Illustration: GOOD GOING ON THE YUKON.]

[Sidenote: TRIBAL CONNECTIONS]

When we left this encampment Isaac sent two of his young men to guide
us, with a sled drawn by three or four small dogs, so gaily caparisoned
with _tapis_ and ribbons, tinsel, and pompons, that they might have
been circus dogs. Here again is evidence of this tribe's affinity
with the upper Yukon natives, and so with those of the Mackenzie. I
never saw the _tapis_, a broad, bright ornamented cloth that lies upon
the dog's back under his harness, on the Middle Yukon. It is
characteristic of the Peel River Indians who come across by the Ram