FASHION IN DEFORMITY. 



733 



soon recovers that which Nature intended for it. In one island alone, 

 Mallicollo, in the New Hebrides, the practice of permanently depress- 

 ing the forehead is almost universal, and skulls are even found con- 

 stricted and elongated exactly after the manner of the Aymaras of 

 ancient Peru. 



Though the Chinese usually allow the head to assume its natural 

 form, confining their attentions to the feet, a certain class of mendi- 

 cant devotees appear to have succeeded to a remarkable extent in 

 getting their skulls elongated into a conical form, if the figure in 

 Picart's " Histoire des Religions," vol. iv., plate 131, is to be trusted. 



America is, however, or rather has been, the headquarters of all 

 these fantastic practices, and especially along the western coast, and 

 mainly in two regions, near the mouth of the Columbia River in the 

 north, and in Peru in the south. The practice also existed among the 

 Indians of the southern part of what are now the United States, and 

 among the Caribs of the West India Islands. In ancient Peru, before 

 the time of the Spanish conquest, it was almost universal. In an edict 

 of the ecclesiastical authorities of Lima, issued in 1585, three distinct 

 forms of deformation are mentioned. Notwithstanding the severe 

 penalties imposed by this edict upon parents persisting in the practice, 

 the custom was so difficult to eradicate that another injunction against 

 it was published by the Government as late as 1752. 



Fig. 10. Posterior View of Cranium, deformed according to the fashion of flattening, with com- 

 pensatory lateral widening. (Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.) 



In the West Indies, and the greater part of North America, the 

 custom has become extinct Avith the people who used it ; but the 

 Chinook Indians, of the neighborhood of the Columbia River, and the 

 natives of Vancouver Island, continue it to the present day, and this 

 is the last stronghold of this strange fashion, though under the influ- 

 ence of European example and discouragement it is rapidly dying out. 

 Here the various methods of deforming the head and their effects have 



