AMERICAN VARIETY. 317 



that, I apprehend, the eyes must be liabitually duected 

 upwards ; which is the more probable, as the orbits in some 

 degree, look upwards, even when the zygomas are hori- 

 zontal. The face is characterized by its great size and 

 strength, and the marked developement of all its parts. 

 What the front of the skull has lost seems compensated 

 here. The nasal bones are not very small nor flat ; the 

 cavity is ample; the jaws and teeth powerful. The superior 

 maxillary bone is very long from the orbit to the alveoli, 

 and slopes regularly forwards in this part. 



Another Carib skull in the College Museum coincides 

 with this in the form of the forehead, in the direction of the 

 eyes upwards, and in the preponderance of the parts placed 

 behind the foramen magnum. 



The same character is seen in a skull engraved in the 

 Journal de Physique^ : but the representation is too badly 

 executed to admit of a satisfactory determination whether 

 it is a natural formation, or the effect of art. Its very 

 general existence in the native tribes of America is expressly 

 and strongly pointed out by Humboldt. " There is no 

 race on the globe, in which the frontal bone is more de- 

 pressed backwards, or which has a less projecting forehead, 

 than the American. This extraordinary flatness is to be 

 found among nations, to whom the means of producing arti- 

 ficial deformity are totally unknown ; as is proved by the 

 crania of Mexican Indians, Peruvians, and Atures, brought 

 over by Mr. BoNPLAND and myself, and of which several 

 were deposited in the Museum of Natural History at Paris." 



He thinks that " the custom of flattening the head had 

 its origin in the idea that beauty consists in such a form of 

 the frontal bone, as to characterize the race in a decided 

 manner. — The Aztecs, who never disfigure the heads of 

 their children, represent their principal divinities, as their 

 hieroglyphical manuscripts prove, wth a head much more 

 flattened than any I have seen among the Caribs f." 



* yipril, 1780. V. 34. tab. 1. 



t Political Essay, \. i. p. 154, and note. 



