470 Bibliographical Notices. 
tiousness and vigilance, in regard to every action, to be the mental 
characteristics of the American race. 
Dr. Morton commences his Cranioscopy with the Peruvian head, 
and after describing and representing the naturally and often artifi- 
cially flattened and retreating forehead, and the extraordinary elon- 
gation backwards of the occiput in this race, refers to the very na- 
tural question,—how a people, with crania so small and so badly 
formed, could have arrived at the degree of civilization which archi- 
tectural remains and historical evidence prove them to have done ? 
He holds that the country was civilized before the advent of the 
Incas, and that these anciently civilized people constituted the iden- 
tical nation whose extraordinary skulls he has represented. With- 
out fully assenting to this opinion, it must be admitted, that there 
is no further evidence of the existence of a race anterior to that 
which preceded the Incas, except the mere suspicion that it would 
require better-formed heads than those in ame to erect the Cy- 
clopean monuments of Peru. 
We are next conducted by Dr. Morton to the crania of the Pata- 
gonian in the south; to those of the nations on the Orinoco, and of 
the tribes of Brazil ; to the Mexican head, with its large and massive 
developments, its full, broad, but retreating forehead, and great in- 
terparietal breadth ; and to the singular artificially-elevated heads of 
the Natchez. 
He then proceeds to the tribes of eastern North America, and to 
the nations of the west and the Colombia district, representing and 
describing the artificially-depressed crania of the Flatheads. 
An inquiry into the geographical distribution of the mounds, and 
an examination of the skulls from these tumuli, leads the Doctor to 
consider the people who reared them to have belonged to the great 
Toltecan race. 
Lastly, the examination of the skulls of the Esquimaux, the Mon- 
gul American of the North, conducts us to the only example of 
Asiatic configuration in the western hemisphere. 
From his extensive inquiries and opportunities for observation, 
Pr. Morton concludes, 1. That the American race differs essentially 
from all others, not excepting the Mongolian; and that the feeble 
analogies of language, and the obvious ones of civil and religious 
institutions, do not prove at the most anything beyond casual or co- 
lonial communication with the Asiatic nations, and that even these 
analogies may be accounted for in the mere coincidence arising from 
similar wants and impulses in nations inhabiting similar localities ; 
2. that the American nations, with the exception of the Polar 
tribes, are of one race and one species, but of two great families, 
which resembled each other in physical, but differed in intellectual 
characters; and, 3. that the cranial remains discovered in the 
mounds from Peru to Wisconsin belong to the same race, and pro- 
bably to the Toltecan family. 
These conclusions contain much that must still remain doubtful in 
the present state of the question ; but Dr. Morton has effected a most 
important service in the cause of natural science in contributing a 
