298 FORMS OF THE SKULL. 



" It is now clearly proved — yet it is necessary to repeat 

 the truth, because the contrary error is still found in the 

 newest works — that neither the Gallas (who border on 

 Abyssinia), nor the Bosjesmen, nor any race of Negroes, 

 produced that celebrated people who gave birth to the civi- 

 lization of ancient Egypt, and from whom we may say that 

 the whole world has inherited the principles of its laws, 

 sciences, and perhaps also religion. 



" Bruce even imagines that the ancient Egyptians were 

 Cushites, or woolly-haired Negroes : he supposes them to 

 have been allied to the Shangallas of Abyssinia. 



" Now that we distinguish the several human races by 

 the bones of the head, and that we possess so many of the 

 ancient Egyptian embalmed bodies, it is easy to prove that, 

 whatever may have been the hue of their skin, they be- 

 longed to the same race with ourselves ; that their cranium 

 and brain were equally voluminous ; in a word, that they 

 formed no exception to tliat cruel law, which seems to have 

 doomed to eternal inferiority all the tribes of our species 

 which are unfortunate enough to have a depressed and com- 

 pressed cranium. 



" I present the head of a mummy, that the Academy may 

 compare it to those of Europeans, Negroes, and Hot- 

 tentots. It is detached from an entire skeleton, which I 

 did not bring on account of its brittleness ; but its comparison 

 has furnished the same results. I h^ve examined, in Paris^ 

 and in the various collections of Europe, more tlian fifty 

 heads of mummies, not one amongst them presented the 

 characters of the Negro or Hottentot*.** 



By examination of the bony head, we learn that the 

 Guanches also, or the race which occupied the Canary 

 Islands at the time of their first discovery by the Euro- 

 peans in the fourteenth century, belonged to the Caucasian 

 variety. The name Guanches signifies men, or sons, in 



* Extrutl (V Observaliflm faUcs sur le Cadcivrc (Vnne Femme connu a Paris 

 el a Londrts sotis le nom de Venus Hottenlotte. Memoircs du Museum 

 d'Hist. Nat. t. iii. p. 173, 174. 



