Keane, 1886:[242] "Dr. H. Rink, in the current number of the Deutsche Geographische Blätter (Bermen, 1886) * * * makes it sufficiently evident that their primeval home must be placed in the extreme northwest, on the Alaskan shores of the Bering Sea * * * the Aleutian Islanders, who are treated by Doctor Rink as a branch of the Eskimo family, but whose language diverges profoundly from, or rather shows no perceptible affinity at all to, the Eskimo. The old question respecting the ethnical affinities of the Aleutians is thus again raised, but not further discussed by our author. To say that they must be regarded as 'ein abnormer Seitenzweig,' merely avoids the difficulty, while perhaps obscuring or misstating the true relations altogether. For these islanders should possibly be regarded, not 'as abnormal offshoot,' but as the original stock from which the Eskimos themselves have diverged. * * * Doctor Rink himself advances some solid reasons for bringing the Eskimo, not from Asia at all, or at least not in the first instance, but from the interior of the North American continent. He holds, in fact, with some other ethnologists, that they were originally inlanders, who, under pressure from the American Indians, gradually advanced along the course of the Yukon, Mackenzie, and other great rivers, to their present homes on the Bering Sea, and Frozen Ocean."
No individual or decided standpoint on the question is taken in the author's Man, Past and Present, 1920 edition.
Brown, 1881:[243] "The Eskimo are therefore an essentially American people, with a meridional range greater than that of any other race. * * *
"It is also clear that this migration has always been from west to east, as also has been that of the Indian tribes; * * *
"Did these hyperboreans come from Asia or are they evolutions, differentiations, as it were, of some of the other American races? That all of the American peoples came originally from Asia, is, I think, an hypothesis for which a great deal might be said. Unless they originated there or were autochthonic, an idea which may at once be dismissed; they could scarcely have come from anywhere else, * * * but the central question is whether the Eskimo are of a later date than the Indians or are really Indians compelled to live under less favorable conditions than the rest of their kinsfolk. The latter will, I think, be found to be the most reasonable view to adopt. * * *
"Doctor Rink seems not far from the truth when he indicates the rivers of Central Arctic America as the region from whence the Eskimo spread northward. * * *
"It is not at all improbable that the original progenitors of the race may have been a few isolated families, members of some small Indian tribe, or the decaying remnants of a larger one. Little by little they were expelled from their hunting and fishing grounds on the original river bank until, finding no place amid the stronger tribes, they settled in a region where they were left to themselves. * * *
"It may, however, be taken as proved that the Eskimo are in no respect and never were a European people; that they are not and never were an Asiatic one, except to the small extent already described; that the handful of people settled on the Siberian shore migrated from America, and that it is very probable the Eskimo came from the interior of Arctic America, Alaska more likely than from any other part of the world."