268 



opposite sides at the same points. The face does not seem to 

 be much distorted, though there appears a slight deviation from 

 a perpendicular to the right. 



The custom of artificially moulding the head is an old cus- 

 tom ; the modern Indians, except on the North-West coast, do 

 not generally practise it. It was practised by the Inca Peru- 

 vians from the eleventh century to the Spanish Invasion, and 

 almost to the present day ; and it was also a custom before the 

 arrival of the Incas in Peru. It seems to have been principally 

 practised among the branches of the Toltecan family of the 

 American aborigines, to which belong the semi-civilized nations 

 of Mexico, and Peru, Yucatan, Nicaragua, &c., and the ancient 

 mound-builders of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The only 

 nations to which this skull can be referred, from the locality in 

 which it was found, and its evident comparative age, seem to be 

 either the Natchez Indians^ a branch of the great Toltecan 

 family, who are supposed to have found their way to the Missis- 

 sippi and even to Florida, about the time of the migration of the 

 Toltecan family from Mexico to Peru, or the Choctavvs, who also 

 had the custom of flattening their children's heads by a bag of 

 sand placed on the forehead. Unlike the other natives of Flo- 

 rida, the Natchez had the custom of moulding the heads of their 

 children by strapping them into the cradle by bands of deer- 

 skin over the forehead. The Natchez Indians were almost 

 exterminated by the French, in 1730, in revenge for the mas- 

 sacre of a French colony the year before ; — a remnant of the 

 nation not long since lived on the Talipoosa River, in Alabama ; 

 they appear now to be extinct. The Charibs, both insular and 

 continental, also had the custom of flattening the forehead, but 

 in such a manner as to increase the antero-posterior, without 

 increasing the vertical diameter ; neither had they the very flat 

 occiput of this skull. Moreover, the Charibs were not natives of 

 Florida, but of the southern continent, whence they extended to 

 the West India Islands. In the Charib skull, a great portion of 

 the brain is posterior to the occipital foramen, so that the head 

 naturally preponderates backwards ; in this skull, on the con- 

 trary, from the perpendicularity of the occiput, almost none of 

 the brain is situated behind the great foramen. 



Without presenting the remarkable conformation figured in 



