.PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 1()1 



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and hieroglyphic memorials of the Mexican provinces they occupy the position of 

 conquerors and divinities. Hence the association of dignity and conventional beauty 

 with a configuration so unseemly has been ascribed to traditional veneration for the 

 dominant power and intellectual superiority of a race with whom the deformity 

 was congenital. Whether such a race ever existed, is a question now at issue 

 among naturalists. 



Baron Humboldt and M. Bonpland are believed to be the first who made this 

 anomaly a subject of scientific investigation. The extraordinary configuration, 

 exhibited by the skulls deposited by them in the Museum of Natural History at 

 Paris, was to be found, according to their testimony, among nations to whom the 

 means of producing artificial deformity were totally unknown. Dr. Morton having 

 adopted this view in his Crania Americana, regarded the cranial conformation 

 indicated by the specimens referred to as characteristic of a primitive type of the 

 American man. Subsequently, he became convinced that, at least in its excessive 

 forms, it was always the result of mechanical pressure. 1 



Dr. Nott, the friend and commentator of Morton, suggests, as a mode of recon- 

 ciling these different conclusions, that they arose from an examination of "contra- 

 dictory materials;" while he himself receives the doctrine of the former existence 

 of an autochthonous race to whom the deformity was natural — a fact which he 

 deems to be established by Dr. Lund's discoveries of fossil crania, as described by 

 Lieut. Strain, and by the developments of Kivero and Von Tschudi. 2 



It is proper, however, to state that Dr. Morton had before him all the means of 

 forming a judgment that are referred to by Dr. Nott, except the Peruvian Antiqui- 

 ties of Bivero and Von Tschudi. Lieut. Strain's account was in the form of a letter 

 addressed to him. In the Essay on the Primitive Type of the American Indians, 

 which Morton commenced for Mr. Schoolcraft's work, but left unfinished at his 

 death, he reaffirms the change of opinion that he had avowed ten years before. 

 After mentioning that Pentland, Tiedemann, Tschudi, and Knox deny the applica- 

 tion of art in the case of the Peruvian skulls, and attribute their shape to an 

 original and congenital peculiarity, he says that his own views on that point were 

 changed by the acquisition of a very extended series of crania from the Peruvian 

 tombs. "I, at first," he continues, "found it difficult to conceive that the original 

 rounded skull of the Indian could be changed into this fantastic form; and was led 

 to suppose that the latter was an artificial elongation of a head remarkable for its 

 natural length and narrowness. I even supposed that the long-headed Peruvians 

 were a more ancient people than the Inca tribes, and distinguished from them by 

 their cranial configuration. In this opinion I was mistaken. Abundant means of 

 observation and comparison have since convinced me that all these variously formed 

 heads were originally of the same rounded shape." 3 v 



• See Ante, p. 18, a. n. s Types of Mankind, p. 440. 



3 Schoolcraft's Hist, and Prosp., &c, II, 320. Dr. Morton began to doubt the correctness of his 

 first opinion before he had seen the work of D'Orbigny, and subsequently announced his "matured 

 conclusions" in connection with the facts he had derived from that distinguished naturalist.— See Am. 

 Journ. of Science, XXXVIII, No. 2, 1840, and "Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the 

 Aboriginal Race of America," pp. 40-3. 



