Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/208

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The children's dresses which are mentioned and illustrated by Parry and Lyon are quite the same as these. On the picture in Parry, p. 403, is a little girl with a fairly large hood, small back-flap on the frock and fairly wide boots; on p. 418 is a smaller child with a sort of ruff of long hair round the neck, which he refers to on p. 496. On page 530 are shown three children dancing; two of them, with wide shoulders and back-flaps, are apparently girls; they all have loose Image missingFig. 154.Snow goggles. hoods with fringes. Lyon[1] says that the usual dress for children between two and three years is a one-piece suit, open at the back. and a loose hood of the skin of the head of a cariboucalf, and later[2] he mentions an infant whose sole garment was a small vest of frock skin.

Snow-goggles (igjat) must be used in spring, from April to July, to protect the eyes against the strong light radiated by the snow. It is mostly the men, however, who use them; many women never use snow-goggles. The indifference which many Eskimos display with regard to protecting their eyes involves that a large number of them, especially the older people, have bad eyes; probably the three cases of blindness at Iglulik were due to this.

Fig. 154 a (Iglulingmiut, Itibdjeriang) shows the most common form of snow-goggle; it is cut out of wood in one piece with slits for the eyes and a hollow for the nose. In the middle of the fore side, near the lower edge, is a 3½ cm groove; at the ends are fastened two short sealskin straps by means of sinew-thread through two holes and a short connecting groove; at the other end of these straps are

  1. ↑ 1824, p. 317.
  2. ↑ l. c., p. 395.
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