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side platforms. Originally these wooden houses were doubtless built by the competing trading companies in order to retain a hold on the Eskimos. With few exceptions the experiment does not seem to have been a success. With their lack of cleanliness, which does not matter so much in a snow house as they soon have to move into a new one, such piles of dirt accumulate in these wooden houses that the stench becomes almost intolerable, especially when in winter they are almost hermetically sealed up.

This reminds me of an episode at Ponds Inlet: At the settlement lived an old man from Iglulik, Utsutsiaq and his old wife, and they had obtained a wooden house too. With their instinctive impulse to pick everything up and keep it, large quantities of all kinds of rubbish had in the course of the years accumulated in their house, and it all produced an almost unbearable smell. The zealous manager of the trading station thought that this was going too far and ordered the house to be removed. The whole population of the settlement was drummed up and they carried the house to a new site. When it was removed, there lay on its old site an enormous heap of old bones, shreds of skin and clothing, pieces of wood, old, worn-out pans and meat-cans, turf, heather, and everything was sodden with blubber. This was in the evening, but the manager said that next morning the whole lot was to be thrown into the sea. When he awoke next morning, rather early, he found that the whole heap had disappeared. And as this Eskimo industry so early in the day seemed suspicious to him, he looked into things: the old people had spent the whole night carrying their accumulated chattels to their new house which was now filled with them, and they themselves lay fast. asleep in the consciousness of having performed a great and useful work.

The main platform in house and tent serves at night as a bed, by day as a work-place for the women who sit there and sew, tend the lamps, cook and eat; when the men are in the house they usually sit on the platform too.

The platform is covered with skins; but under these is as a rule a platform covering, partly for the purpose of making the platform comfortable and especially to keep the platform skins from direct contact with the snow in the snow house and thus prevent them. from becoming wet on the under side. In the tent and qarmaq where this precaution is not necessary, it is as a rule sufficient to re-