1888. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 5 
peculiarities among the various tribes, particularly the process 
of flattening the cranium by pressure. He described the cradle, 
and the cushions and boards used for compressing the head of 
the infant. He showed that on the North Pacific Coast various 
types of deformed skulls occur. In askull from the southern 
part of Vancouver Island, the frontal and occipital bones were 
perfectly flat, and a marked depression was found immediately 
behind the coronal suture. On account of the strong antero- 
posterior pressure, these skulls are very short, but this is com- 
pensated by their greater breadth. The width-length index of 
these deformed skulls ranges from 97 to 102, Another group of 
skulls, collected among atribe which belongs to thesame linguistic 
stock as the former, are also deformed; but they have rounded 
occipital and frontal bones. ‘The occipital flattening extends be- 
yond the Lambda. The parietal bones have enormous eminences 
which compensate for the retarded growth in length. A great 
number of these skulls have Wormian bones. Among sixty de- 
formed skulls, two were found in which the frontal suture re- 
mained open atan advancedage. In one thereis a synostosis of the 
parietal bones. The last cranium is nevertheless hyper-brachyce- 
phalic. Many skulls of this class are very asymmetric, It is 
remarkable that in almost all asymmetric crania the left side is 
larger than theright. This is probably due to the way in which 
the children lie in the cradle. Skulls found in a number of 
ancient cairns and in shell-heaps, prove that the inhabitants at 
that period belonged to the same race and deformed their heads 
in the same way asthe present tribes do, While the skulls 
which had been described so far belonged to tribes of Salish line- 
age, the next type belonged to the Kwakiutl. The heads are 
conical, the vertex lies considerably behind the bregma. The 
occiput of these skulls is somewhat flattened. It seems that 
undeformed crania of the Kwakiutl and Salish belong to two 
separate types, the former being much more dolichocephalic 
and hypsicephalic. The Kwakiutl tribes on the northern half 
of Vancouver Island deform principally the heads of female 
children. The Tsimshian and Haida do not deform the heads 
of their children. As these people are in the habit of burning 
their dead, it is only by chance that graves are met with. The 
