ABSTRACT
Mr. Batchelor, first and special missionary to the Ainu, has collected many curious animal tales and bits of folk lore, some of them as unlike Japanese folk stories as possible, while others are attributed to Chinese and Japanese influences. Certainly the hairy Ainu should be the joy of all who delight in ethnological puzzles, for, as Professor Chamberlain says, nobody knows anything of their origin, and so far nobody can find out. The long beards and general cast of features of the Ainu are so strikingly like Russian peasants that the comparison has been made very often, but so far no racial affinity has been proved. A curious physical trait is that the Ainu skeleton has the bones of the forearm and leg noticeably flattened. Like the Japanese, the Ainu begin to build a house roof first, making the horizontal frame and placing the supports and ridgepole, and laying shorter pieces for rafters.
