Dr King on the Physical Characters of the Esquimaux, 299 



Mankind*'* has made no allusion to the form of the skull of the 

 Esquimaux in his first edition ; but in that of 1826, there i« a 

 description agreeing with a skull which he has figured, and which 

 figure and description appear in his recent work, entitled the 

 " Natural History of Man." The letter-press runs as follows i 

 " The face is of a lozenge shape, rising like one of the faces of a 

 pyramid almost to a point," — and so it is represented. But a 

 comparison with four skulls figured in Blumenbach's Decades, 

 four in Morton''s Crania Americana, one in the collection of the 

 Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, one in the 

 Museum of Guy's Hospital, and twelve in the possession of the 

 phrenologist Deville, entirely contradicts Dr Prichard's re- 

 marks. It is true that Clleilly has given a similar description to 

 that of Dr Prichard.f " The forehead," in the opinion of that 

 traveller, in allusion to the Esquimaux of the island of Disoo, 

 " and the side of the head above the temples are greatly de- 

 pressed ; the crown is elevated considerably ; and the back of 

 the head is depressed as the forehead. The smaller end of a 

 hen's egg presents a familiar resemblance to their cranium." 

 But after inspecting fourteen skulls, and representations of 

 eight more, I am led to believe that O'Reilly and Dr Prichard 

 have been describing the same skull, which owes its peculiarity 

 to some accidental cause ; and since O'Reilly wrote in 1818, 

 and Dr Prichard in 1826, it is probable that the Doctor sought 

 for^ and obtained, the skull which O'Reilly has described. 

 However this may be, it is certain that the skull figured by 

 Dr Prichard cannot be taken as a type of this Arctic family, 

 it would be as incorrect, with the materials before us, to agree 

 with Dr Prichard, as, with our knowledge of the custom of ar- 

 tificially modifying the form of the head practised by the na- 

 tives of North-western America, to fall in with the views of 

 Professor Tiedemann, and Mr Pentland, that the skulls found 

 in the ancient graves, called huacas, in the great alpine valley 

 of Titicaca, were moulded so by nature. The Esquimaux, in 

 my opinion, strongly exemplify the broad-faced and mode- 

 rately-vaulted character of the skull classified as Mongolian. 

 The most striking characteristic is the outward projection of 



♦ Dr Prichard. 



t O'Reilly's Greeoland, emd the North-West Passage, p. 62. 



