Crania of Aboriginal Americans. 129 



" It would," he continues, " be natural to suppose, that a 

 people with heads so small and badly formed, would occupy 

 the lowest place in the scale of human intelligence. Such, 

 however, was not the case." He considers it ascertained that 

 " civilization existed in Peru anterior to the advent of the 

 Incas, and that those anciently civilized people constituted the 

 identical nations whose extraordinary skulls are the subjects 

 of our present inquiry. 



If these skulls had been compressed by art, we could have 

 understood that certain portions of the brain might have been 

 only displaced, but not destroyed. The spine, for instance, 

 may be bent, as in hump-back, yet retain its functions ; and 

 we might suppose the anterior lobe, in cases of compression, 

 to be developed laterally, or backwards, and still preserve 

 its identity and uses. This, indeed, is Dr Morton's own con- 

 clusion, in regard to the brain in the flat-headed Indians. 

 He gives an interesting and authentic description of the in- 

 strument and process by means of which the flat-head tribes of 

 Columbia River compress the skull, and remarks, that " besides 

 the depression of the head, the face is widened and projected 

 forward by the process, so as materially to diminish the facial 

 angle ; the breadth between the parietal bones is greatly aug- 

 mented, and a striking irregularity of the two sides of the 

 cranium almost invariably follows ; yet the absolute internal 

 capacity of the skull is not diminished, and, strange as it may 

 seem, the intellectual faculties suff*er nothing. The latter fact 

 is proved by the concurrent testimony of all travellers who 

 have wTitten on the subject." Dr Morton adds, that in Janu- 

 ary 1839, he was gratified with a personal interview with a 

 full blood Chenouk, in Philadelphia. He is named William 

 Brooks, was twenty years of age, had been three years in 

 charge of some Christian missionaries, and had acquired great 

 proficiency in the English language, which he understood and 

 spoke with a good accent and general grammatical accuracv. 

 His head was as much distorted by mechanical compression, 

 as any skull of his tribe in Dr Morton's possession. "He 

 appeared to me," he adds, " to possess more mental acuteness 

 than any Indian I had seen, was communicative, cheerful, 

 and well mannered." The measurements of his head were . 



VOL/ XXIX. NO, LVII.— JULY 1840. I 



