pliability. A truly ingenious and original idea to flay a birch tree and make a boat of its skin! In the framework of the canoe we have the embryo ribs and inweale of the future boat, and the three cross-tics may be regarded as the ancestors of tarts to be born in time to come. As yet no keel. But that was soon to be. Go north, and trees become scarcer and dwindle in size. The birch is no longer of sufficient girth to serve the ingenious savage in the construction of a canuc. But the inventive genius of man was not to be denied. Skins of beasts, or woven material made waterproof, stretched upon a frame would serve for the same purpose as bark, But a stronger framework was necessary fora material thinner and more pliable than bark. And accordingly in all this class (except the coracle) we find stronger and more numerous timbers, including a longitudinal piece from stem to stern, and uprights at each end acting as stempost and sternpost respectively. “The rude canvas-covered vessels of Tory Island, off the west coast of Ireland, still preserve one development of this type, close at home to us; while the cayaks of the Esquimaux and the larger fishing canoes of the Alaskans and the Greenlanders exhibit the skin-clad variety in many forms. In one of the models exhibited at the Fisheries Exhibition the framework showed in great perfection the ingenuity of the savage, to whom wood was a very scarce and precious article, short pieces being madeto serve fitted together and fastened with thongs of hide, the whole being covered with a stout walrusskin. Even outriggers {as understood by the English oatsman) made of double loops of hide just long enough to cross each other and enclose the loom of the oar, were attached to the inner side of the gunwale.
Not only bark and skin and canvas-covered canoes exist and seem to have existed fram an tnknown antiquity, but a similar cause to that of which we were just speaking, viz. a scarcity of wood or of suitable wood, led to the construction ef canoes of wood made of short pieces stitched together, and approaching more nearly to the type of vessel which may be called a boat. ‘To these belong. the canoes of Easter Island made of drift
