DR. FLOSS ON "THE CHILD:' 



241 



its first origin even in Egypt, the country where 

 its earliest traces appear in the great Old World 

 district it now occupies. How it reached Austra- 

 lia, Feejee, perhaps even South America, before Eu- 

 ropeans visited these countries, or whether it was 

 invented there, there is no evidence. But as to 

 the reason of it, there is a fair case in favor of 

 those who agree with Dr. Ploss that it was adopt- 

 ed from belief in its being a practically beneficial 

 operation. At any rate, those who find in it the 

 more mystic purpose of a symbol or a sacrifice 

 must find it harder to explain why as such it has 

 come to prevail over so large and distant regions. 

 Among customs derived from early stages of 

 culture in Europe one deserves especial notice, 

 which probably dates back far beyond the crom- 

 lechs and dolmens. Though the memory of its 

 original purpose may be lost among the peasants 

 who keep it up, it may still be interpreted among 

 the tribes of the savage and barbaric world, to 

 whom it properly belongs. This is the practice 

 of deforming the skulls of infants (chapter xiv.). 

 Within the last generation or so, medical observ- 

 ers have put on record its extensive prevalence in 

 France, the custom of Normandy being for the 

 nurses to give the baby's skull the approved 

 sugar-loaf shape by means of bandages and a 

 tight cap, while in Brittany the long shape of the 

 new-born child's head is disapproved of, and press- 

 ure is applied to make it round. This latter ap- 

 pears to have been the old Swiss custom, to judge 

 from a passage in the seventeenth-century " He- 

 bammenbuchlein " of Muralt : " As soon as the 

 nurse has the child on her lap she looks it all 

 over to see if it is well shaped, then gives its lit- 

 tle head the round form, and puts on a scarlet 

 fur and cap to preserve it." It is interesting to 

 find the nurses not only shaping the babies' skulls, 

 but shaping them to different types in different 

 districts. One is reminded of the two contrasted 

 portraits in Wilson's " Prehistoric Man," repre- 

 senting heads from two tribes of Northwest 

 America, one (the Newattee) shaped into a cone, 

 the other (the Chinook) with the forehead flat- 

 tened and broadened, so that the unfortunate 

 child looks in front like an aggravated case of 

 water on the brain. So in New Caledonia some 

 tribes prefer a long-head and others a flat-head 

 type, and compel the infants' plastic little skulls 

 to grow accordingly. This difference of opinion 

 as to the desirable form of skull helps to explain 

 the origin of the custom, as having arisen from 

 the type of the dominant race, being artificially 

 produced or exaggerated. On this supposition 

 we should expect to find, as we actually do, flat- 

 52 



headed or round-headed conquerors and nobles 

 set up as models in different districts. Such a 

 state of things is well shown among the Flat- 

 head Indians, who enslave the neighboring tribes 

 with undistorted skulls ; the children of these 

 captives are not allowed to have their skulls band- 

 aged in the cradle, so as to imitate the badge of 

 nobility, and even white men are despised for 

 having round heads like slaves. Just as natu- 

 rally the nurses in Turkey in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, as the famous surgeon Vesalius mentions, 

 gave the children bullet-heads, and among the 

 Asiatic population of Constantinople it seems to 

 be done still. The motive popularly assigned is 

 that a round head suits best for wearing a turban, 

 but the real reason probably lies much deeper in 

 the imitation of the round skulls of the conquer- 

 ing Tartar race. The details, which show how 

 large a part of mankind have habitually prac- 

 tised cranial deformation, suggest the ques- 

 tion whether any nations have been perceptibly 

 injured by it. There are remarkable cases to the 

 contrary, such as that of the Chinooks, whose 

 monstrous deformation is said not to increase the 

 mortality of the children, or even to prevent 

 their growing up fully to the savage level of 

 strength, bravery, and cleverness. On the other 

 hand, travelers have set down some races with 

 compressed skulls as exceptionally stupid. It is 

 more to the purpose that in modern France medi- 

 cal observers, such as Foville and Lunier, have 

 noticed among the insane an unusual proportion 

 of patients with artificially distorted skulls, and 

 have also remarked a prevalence of mental dis- 

 ease in those districts where the nurses still most 

 persistently keep up the practice of skull-shaping. 

 That the origin of ceremonies is to be sought 

 in practical proceedings is a principle not only 

 accepted by Dr. Ploss, but particularly well illus- 

 trated by several of the topics he deals with. 

 Thus, in connection with so practical a matter as 

 the feeding of the child, there have sprung up 

 ceremonial customs of giving it the first taste of 

 milk and honey, or butter and honey ; with this, 

 again, comes to be associated a peculiar mean- 

 ing, that it confers the right to live, it being" a 

 well-known rule that the child, having once tasted 

 milk and honey, is not to be killed or exposed 

 (chapter xiii.). Again, what can be more prosa- 

 ically practical than cutting a child's hair? Yet 

 hair-cutting, especially for the first time, appears 

 on both sides of the world as a high ceremonial 

 act. It was so among rude American tribes such 

 as the Abipones ; in New Zealand the shaving of 

 the child's head with an obsidian knife was done 



