Besides the meat of Polar bears and of any fur animals they could catch, or the musky beef of the musk ox, they devoured eagerly sea birds' eggs, Iceland moss, and even the parasitic insects of their own heads and bodies! Hearne relates that they will eat with a relish whole handfuls of maggots that have been produced in meat by the eggs of the bluebottle fly! On the other hand, they held cannibalism in horror, whereas for two-two's their Amerindian neighbours on the west and south would eat human flesh without repugnance.
The Eskimo, though occasionally tall, are as a rule stumpy and thickset, with very small hands and feet, broad faces, and projecting cheekbones, a narrow nose without the aquiline bridge of the Amerindian, slanting narrow eyes, and long heads containing large well-developed brains.

In disposition the Eskimo are nearly always merry, affectionate to one another, honest, and modest.

Modern travellers in the Arctic regions give them invariably a high character; but Frobisher, Davis, and the explorers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accused them of treachery and an inclination to steal.

Iron in any shape or form they could hardly resist taking.
Moreover, if they are the same people as the Skraellings of the Norse traditions they must have been of a fiercer disposition a thousand years ago.
The Amerindians who inhabited (more or less) the rest of the Canadian Dominion, and the whole remainder of the New World, differed in physical appearance from the Eskimo mainly in being taller and better proportioned, with shorter and rounder heads, larger, fuller eyes, a bigger nose, and a handsomer personal appearance.

The skin colour, as a rule, was darker and browner than the greyish- or pinkish-yellow of the Eskimo.
The various human types that went to form the Amerindian race (beside the Eskimo element in them) seem to have entered north-west America from Asia, and first to have peopled the Pacific slopes of the Rocky Mountains, after which they wandered farther and farther south till they got into a warmer climate.