DR. STEFANSSON ON OSTRICHES AND ESKIMOS.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I have been travelling most of the time since you published my last series of three articles in the Spectator, 'and I am, therefore, not sure that I have seen all the comments. I lam glad to realize my fond expectation that most of the comment would be in confirmation. All but one of the letters in contradiction failed to show any real issue between me and the writers. They indicate only careless reading on their part or lack of clarity on mine. An example is the correspondent who is surprised that I deny that ostriches hide their heads, and goes on to say that when on the nest the mother bird lies as flat and inconspicuous as she can, using every device to conceal her head as well as her body. That was exactly what I tried to say. I was merely contra- dicting the classic notion that the bird hides its head and takes no precaution to hide the rest of the body.
Another example where my critic and myself would be in complete agreement if he had only got from the article the meaning which I intended to put into it, is the letter of G. M. Gathorne-Hardy in your issue for Mardi 1st. He begins by saying that he has been " considerably surprised by Mr. Stefansson's recent article to the effect that Eskimos do not drink oil," and then goes on to offer to send me photo- graphs of bags of oil which he saw in Labrador, and asks : Will Mr. Stefansson enlighten me as to what these were ifor if not, as seemed to be the impression on the spot, for ;internal consumption ? " Now, the main point of my article was to draw a distinction between the drinking of oil and the use of oil as food, while your correspondent seems to think that using oil for food is identical with drinking oil. I have seen both gravy and olive oil in containers of various sorts on the tables of Englishmen, but I would be among those who would quickly deny ever having seen Englishmen drink- ing either gravy or olive oil, although I would be equally ready to affirm that they do use them as articles of food.
If I had ever said that Eskimos do not use oil for food, the i most pertinent disproof would be to cite statements and ,photographs in various of my own books which assert and imply that Eskimos do use oil as food somewhat as we use butter, olive oil, &c.
The only case of a real issue and a real correction was the letter pointing out that Professor Terman, of Leland Stanford University, had ascertained that school children have vocabularies of as much as 13,000 words. The fault was mine in accepting the earlier statement that men who had taken honours in English at Oxford had been found to average about 11,000 words in their vocahularies. However, that does not invalidate the conclusion of my article, which was to the effect that many if not most " primitive " people taive a language far more extensive in vocabulary than we have thought, and usually far more complex in inflection than the ordinary modern languages of Western Europe.—I am,
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