The Eskimos are remarkably uniform in physical appearance
throughout their far-stretching area, there being perhaps no other
nation in the world so unmixed in blood. Frobisher's people were
struck with their resemblance in features and general aspect to the
Samoyeds and their physiognomy has been held by all ethnologists
to be of the Mongolian or Tartar type. Doctor Latham calls the
Samoyeds Hyperborean Mongolidae, and the Eskimos he ranges among
the American Mongolidae, embracing in the latter group all the
native races of the New World. The Mongol type of countenance is,
however, more strongly reproduced in the Eskimos than in the red
Indians--the conterminous Tinné tribes differing greatly in their
features, and the more remote Indians still more.
Generally the Eskimos have broadly egg-shaped faces with
considerable prominence of the rounded cheeks caused by the arching
of the cheek bones, but few or no angular projections even in the
old people, whose features are always much weather beaten and
furrowed. The greatest breadth of the face is just below the eyes,
the forehead tapers upward, ending narrowly, but not acutely, and
in like manner the chin is a blunt cone; both the forehead and the
chin recede, the egg outline showing in profile, though not so
strongly, as in a front view. The nose is broad and depressed, but
not in all, some individuals having prominent noses, yet almost all
have wider nostrils than Europeans. The eyes have small and oblique
apertures like the Chinese, and from frequent attacks of ophthalmia
and the effect of lamp smoke in their winter habitations adults of
both sexes are disfigured by excoriated or ulcerated eyelids. The
sight of these people is, from its constant exercise, extremely
keen, and the habit of bringing the eyelids nearly together when
looking at distant objects has in all the grown males produced a
striking cluster of furrows radiating from the outer corners of
each eye over the temples.
The complexions of the Eskimos when relieved from smoke and dirt
are nearly white and show little of the copper color of the red
Indians. Infants have a good deal of red on the cheeks, and when
by chance their faces are tolerably clean are much like European
children, the national peculiarities of countenance being slighter
at an early age. Many of the young women appear even pretty from
the liveliness and good nature that beams in their countenances.
The old women are frightfully ugly * * *.
The young men have little beard, but some of the old ones have a
tolerable show of long gray hairs on the upper lip and chin. * * *
The Eskimo beard, however, is in no instance so dense as a European
one.
The hair of the head is black and coarse, the lips thickish, and
the teeth of the young people white and regular, but the sand that,
through want of cleanliness, mixes with their food, wears the teeth
down at an early age almost to the level of the gums, so that the
incisors often have broad crowns like the molars.
The average stature of the Eskimos is below the English standard,
but they can not be said to be a dwarfish race. The men vary in
height from about 5 feet to 5 feet 10 inches or even more. They
are a broad-shouldered race, and when seated in their kayaks look
tall and muscular, but when standing lose their apparent height by
a seemingly disproportionate shortness of the lower extremities.
This want of symmetry may arise from the dress, as the proportions
of various parts of the body have not been tested by accurate
measurements. The hands and feet are delicately small and well
formed. Mr. Simpson (Blue Book, 1855) observed an undue shortness
of the thumb in the western Eskimos, which, if it exists farther to
the east, was not noted by the members of the searching expeditions.