ANDERSON RIVER TYPE.
The Anderson River throwing-stick (and we should include the Mackenzie River district) is a very primitive affair in the National Museum, being only a tapering flat stick of hard wood (Fig. 5). Marks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are wanting. The index-finger cavity is large and eccentric and furnishes a firm hold. The shaft-groove is a rambling shallow slit, not over half an inch wide. There is no hook or spur of foreign material inserted for the spear end; but simply an excavation of the hard wood which furnishes an edge to catch a notch in the end of the dart. Only one specimen has been collected from this area for the National Museum; therefore it is unsafe to make it typical, but the form is so unique that it is well to notice that the throwing-stick in Eskimoland has its simplest form in the center and not in the extremities of its whole area. It is as yet unsafe to speculate concerning the origin of this implement. A rude form is as likely to be a degenerate son as to be the relic of a barbaric ancestry. Among the theories of origin respecting the Eskimo, that which claims for them a more southern habitat long ago is of great force. If, following retreating ice, they first struck the frozen ocean at the mouth of Mackenzie's River and then invented the kyak and the throwing-stick, thence we may follow both of these in two directions as they depart from a single source.