OF THE CLASS MAMMALIA. 265 



[The cranium of the American race is remarkable for the 

 depression of the forehead, and this character seems to have 

 belonged to the aboriginal races first peopling America. This is 

 proved by the remains of Mexican antiquities and by the drawings 

 of the Aztec race, a race now seemingly extinct. To such an ex- 

 tent was the forehead depressed in that race, that were it not for 

 these drawings and the existence of the same malformation in the 

 Cherooks and other tribes still existing, it might have been 

 inferred that no such race of men could ever have existed. 



Hippocrates mentions a race of men with similarly formed heads 

 as inhabiting, in his days, the shores of the Euxine, and recently 

 crania of a similar character have been said to have been found 

 in Gennany, in situations implying a high antiquity. A notion 

 has been thrown out by some popular writers that man, at first 

 rude and savage, small brained, and deficient consequently in 

 intellectual powers, has been gradually improved by education 

 and civilization, and that by the culture of his intellectual powers 



Fig. 229. Ethiopian Kace. 



his brain has become enlarged, and with it the cranium. Like all 

 medical theorists (for they are medical men who advocate such 

 hypotheses) they catch at any statement which may seem favour- 

 able to their latest hypothesis, wholly regardless not only of its 

 incompatibility with other facts but with their own theories. Such 

 a notion is moreover refuted by all human history, and is abso- 

 lutely antagonistic with the chronological system which to a man 

 they have adopted. R.K.] 



["The term Caucasian was devised by Blumenbach to charac- 

 terize a certain number of the higher races of man, but he did 



