PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 103 



tlie Peruvian race were exclusive!// artificial." Such an hypothesis they imagine to 

 have been based solely on the crania of adults; whereas the heads of children of 

 the most tender age, exhibiting no vestige of pressure, were of similar conformation, 

 and the same fact was observable in the case of infants yet unborn, which had been 

 discovered among the mummies. The phenomenon is made more remarkable by 

 the statement that jn the crania of these children is found a peculiar bone, or divi- 

 sion of the occipital portion of the skull, wanting in all other human beings, and 

 corresponding to the os interparietalis of Eodentia and Marsupiata. This anomaly 

 was first brought to notice, by Dr. Franklin Bellamy, an English naturalist, in 

 1842, and subsequently the bone received, from Dr. J. D. Von Tschudi, the name 

 of u Os Incce" in reference to the nation to which it was confined. Messrs. Rivero 

 and J. J. Von Tschudi declare that they can " assert with certainty" that in some 

 departments of Peru remnants of the races whose natural form of head has been 

 imitated by compression may still be found, as they have themselves had occasion 

 to see. 1 



We are not aware that such cranial deformity has been supposed to have ever 

 existed naturally anywhere in the United States; and if the source from whence 

 the practice was derived as an imitation could be determined, it might be the means 

 of solving important archaeological propositions. 



The inquiry arises, whether these peculiarities, let them be natural or artificial, 

 must have been indigenous to the country, or might have been introduced from 

 abroad. To which it may be answered, that history is not entirely silent on this 

 subject. In that border land between Europe and Asia, which was in earlier ages, 

 as it is again, the seat of great events affecting the world's history — at once the 

 birthplace and the battle-ground of nations — Hippocrates has located a people whom 

 he calls the Macrocephali, or Longheads. Some of them dwelt near the river 

 Phasis, and not far from the recently captured Turkish province of Kars. The 

 shape of their heads, he tells us, " was at first a work of art, because they esteemed 

 those having the longest heads the most noble, but nature had accommodated her- 

 self to it. It began in this way. As soon as an infant was born, they moulded 

 the soft and tender head with their hands, and compelled it to grow into the desired 

 form by bandages and other contrivances. In the course of time, this configuration 

 became natural to the people, and the use of means to produce it ceased to be 

 necessary." 2 



On Bactrian coins, in crania from the coast of Yemen, and in the islands of the 

 Indian Archipelago, a similar configuration is reported to have been observed. 3 

 The former existence of " Flat-heads' in Asia Minor has been confirmed by the 



1 Peruvian Antiquities, ch. ii., Dr. Hawks' translation, N. T., 1853. The original edition of this 

 national work was printed for the authors at Vienna, in 1851. v 



3 Hippocrates, Opera Omnia, ed. 1595, sec. iii. p. 72, freely translated. "If other singularities are 

 transmitted to offspring," Hippocrates asks, "what hinders then that a Macrocephalus should be born 

 of a Macrocephalus ?" Though now, he intimates, they are not in like manner so born, because, for 

 want of care, the model has become extinct. 



3 Smith's Races of Men, p. 143, and Plate V. Crawford's Ind. Archipel., I, 218. 



