18 Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton Smith 
families, the adoption of male children and the abduction of 
females, that their blood is mixed in all, and necessarily the 
most predominant in the whole population. There exist, 
nevertheless, from the Arctic circle to Terra del Fuego, 
practices having no counterpart that we know of in any 
other region of the world, and affording proofs of antiquity 
as remote as the oldest works of art, and the most ancient 
skeletons of man in those regions, can suggest. From 
them it might be inferred, that once the vast territory of the 
Western World had been in possession of a variety of man 
distinct from the three great stocks of the Old Continent, 
unless we can understand it to be of that swarthy unde- 
fined race of Asiatic antiquity, the Flatheads, Kakasiah, 
Nimrecs, and Dombuks of Persia, primeval enemies of the 
Iranian race, vanquished by the Huscheng and Tahmuras ; 
and the same as the Preeadamites of La Peyrere, whose 
treatise, derived from oriental sources, caused so much com- 
motion and so many victorious refutations in the seventeenth 
century. The skulls of these antique Americans present pe- 
culiarities not quite satisfactorily explained by physiologists, 
being extremely elongated, and the facial angle depressed, 
leaving scarcely any forehead. Now, although this mon- 
strosity may be produced in a great measure by artificial 
means, the heads of infants, considered to belong to the same 
race, so young as to have still all the sutures open, have the 
forehead depressed, the temples enlarged, but no evident 
sign of similar pressure at the back, where the occipital bone 
is distinctly separated into an upper and a lower portion, 
each of greater size than the single bone of Caucasians of 
the same age, and the facial bones are already exceedingly 
solid, with an elevated ridge round each of the orbits. Whe- 
ther these are precisely the same as the Aturian crania of 
Blumenbach, we shall not decide, but remark only upon the 
controversial statements we have seen on the subject, that 
the diversity of opinion, in a great measure, arose from the 
inspection of another set of Peruvian, and even Titicaca 
skulls, whereof the forehead is but little depressed, but the 
occiput is vertical, and obliquely contracted, from evident 
early contact with a hard substance behind. We have seen 
