96 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



froni most of them and sold. During the excavations many hu- 

 man bones and other relics were found, but they attracted little 

 interest, and most of them were destroyed. I learned, however, 

 during a recent visit to the islands, that a few of the bones had 

 found their way into the hands of thoughtful and intelligent per- 

 sons, and had thus been preserved. Their custodians at once ap- 

 preciated my desire to study them, and generously placed them 

 at my service for this purpose, so that I was able to obtain notes 

 for a pretty complete anthropological description of the Ceboynas. 

 The wife of the governor of the colony, Mrs. Blake, a most enthu- 

 siastic and able naturalist, whose contributions to science are 

 well known, had herself explored one of the caves an undertak- 

 ing which calls for energy and endurance quite incomprehensible 

 to any one who has never attempted exploration in the tropics. 

 She had found fragments of several skeletons in the cave, and she 

 placed them all in my hands as soon as I expressed a wish to study 

 them. Dr. J. C. Alberry, a Nassau physician, was equally generous 

 with a female skull in perfect preservation, which he had in his 

 office, and both he and Mrs. Blake afterward authorized me to de- 

 posit these relics of a lost and almost unknown race in one of our 

 great anthropological collections. The Nassau Public Library con- 

 tains two male skulls which the trustees kindly permitted me to 

 draw and measure. 



As the result of my examination of this material, I am now 

 able to state that the Lucayans were large people, about equal in 

 size and stature to the average European, and very muscular and 

 heavy. The bones, especially those of the skulls, are very thick, 

 firm, and heavy, with a surface almost as dense and white as ivory. 

 After examining the skulls, it is easy to credit the statement that 

 the steel swords of the Spaniards were often broken over the hard 

 heads of the Lucayans. The brain was large, and the capacity of 

 the cranium is about equal to that of an average Caucasian skull ; 

 but they had protuberant jaws and the powerful neck- and jaw- 

 muscles of true savages, and the outlines of the skulls have none 

 of the softness and delicacy which characterize those of more 

 civilized and gentle races of men. The eyes were very oblique, 

 sloping downward away from the nose, and the orbits are very 

 large and angular. The cheek-bones are broad and high, and the 

 jaws peculiarly massive and square. 



The skulls are extremely broad in proportion to their length, 

 and they are among the most brachycephalic, or round-headed, of 

 all known human skulls, the greatest breadth being more than 

 nine tenths of the greatest length. 



The Ceboynas flattened their heads artificially in infancy, so 

 that the vertical part of the forehead is completely obliterated in 

 all the adult skulls, and the head slopes backward immediately 



