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November 3, 1852. 



The President in the Chair. 



Dr. Kneeland read a paper on a Flat-head Indian skull, 

 from Florida, where it was found imbedded in an artificial 

 deposit of shells. He believed it to be the skull of a 

 Natchez Indian. 



This skull was obtained from the midst of a deposit of shells 

 about eight miles above Apalachicola, Florida ; nearly the whole 

 skeleton was thus found, all but the skull either having been 

 broken by the carelessness- of the workmen, or having soon 

 crumbled on exposure to the air ; it was found about five feet 

 below the surface of the ground ; the shell deposit is a bed of 

 Gnathodons, a shell living in brackish water. There are hun- 

 dreds of these beds all along the Gulf shore, sometimes several 

 hundred feet in extent and ten or twenty feet thick ; they are 

 generally supposed to be artificial, having been thrown into 

 heaps by the Indians after eating their contents ; similar beds of 

 oysters are also seen, in which are occasionally found Indian 

 bones, pottery, charred wood, and similar Indian remains. 



The high cheek bones, the large quadrangular orbits, and the 

 breadth between them, the anterior projection of the upper jaw 

 and slanting direction of the teeth, and, (apart from the manifest 

 distortion,) the prominent vertex and vertical occiput, taken 

 together, sufficiently indicate that this is an Indian skull, and 

 the distortion would show it of considerable antiquity, compared 

 with the existing Indian tribes. From its locality it could not 

 belong to the existing Flat-heads of the North-West Coast. 



The head to which this comes the nearest is the Inca Peru- 

 vian, though it is more distorted even than that ; in the lat- 

 ter the sharpness of the superciliary ridges and the prominent 

 nasal bones would indicate that the pressure anteriorly was 

 above the orbits, while the flatness of these regions in this skull 

 would indicate that the pressure was also applied over these 

 ridges and even to the upper part of the face. The flatness of 



