looked at him in perfect amazement, wondering what he was trying to do with all these singular motions.  He endeavoured to explain to them in great excitement that the man had been brought up apparently within arm’s length, and yet he could not touch him.  His comrades of course denied indignantly that the man had moved at all, and they engaged in a furious dispute as to whether this innocent and unconscious man had been anywhere near them or not.  The native who maintained the affirmative appealed to me; but, convulsed with laughter, I could make no reply, and he started off at a run, to see the man and find out whether he had been brought up or not, and how it felt to be transported over a hundred yards of space in an instant of time!  We who are familiar with these discoveries of science can hardly realise how they appear to a wholly uneducated savage; but if a superior race of beings should come from the planet Mars and show us a mysterious instrument which enabled a man to be in two different places at the same time, we should understand the sensations of a Chukchi in looking through a field-glass.

Soon after this I happened to be encamped one night on a great plain near Anadyrsk, with a party of these same natives; and having received a note from Dodd by a special messenger, I was engaged in reading it by the camp-fire.  At several humorous passages I burst into a loud laugh; whereupon the natives nudged one another with their elbows and pointed significantly at me, as much as to say, “Just look at the crazy American!  What’s the matter with him now?” Finally one of them, an old grey-haired man, asked me what I was laughing at.  “Why,” said I, “I am laughing at this,” and pointed to the piece of paper.  The old man thought about it for a moment, compared notes with the others, and they all thought about it; but no one seemed to succeed in getting any light as to the cause of my incomprehensible laughter.  In a few moments the old man picked up a half-burned stick which was lying by the fire and said:  “Now suppose I should look at this stick for a minute and then laugh; what would you think?” “Why,” said I candidly, “I should think you were a fool.”  “Well,” he rejoined with grave satisfaction, “that’s just exactly what I think of you!” He seemed to be very much pleased to find that our several opinions of such insane conduct so exactly coincided.  Looking at a stick and laughing, and looking at a piece of paper and laughing, seemed to him equally absurd.  The languages of the Chukchis and Koraks have never-been reduced to writing; nor, so far as I know, do either of those tribes ever attempt to express ideas by signs or pictures.  Written thought is to many of them an impossible conception.  It can be imagined, perhaps, with what wonder and baffled curiosity they pore over the illustrated newspapers which are occasionally given to them by the sailors of whaling vessels which visit the coast.  Some of the pictures they recognise as representations