THE HUMAN SPECIES. 14> 



THE ATURIAN PALTAS OR FLATHEADS 

 OF SOUTH AMERICA. 



OF all abnormal nations, the most singular were those 

 Flatheads of South America, whose bones and skulls 

 now remaining, furnish the only proof, that a people, 

 with such strange conformation of the cranium, have 

 positively existed ; and if we could now ascertain, to 

 what extent they likewise differed from the other typical 

 forms of man, in the physiological conditions of struc- 

 ture of the softer parts; such, for example, as the pecu- 

 liar epidermis which Monsieur Flourens ascribes to the 

 whole red race of America ; a quality which they, as 

 the most normal of them, may have possessed to a 

 still greater extent ; the question would assume a para- 

 mount interest one, perhaps, more indicative of a 

 distinct origin than any before noticed. 



Dr. Tschudi, describing this form, in his paper on 

 the ancient Peruvians, remarks on the flattened occiput 

 of the cranium, and observes, " that there is found, in 

 children, a bone between the two parietals, below the 

 lambdoidal suture, separating the latter from the infe- 

 rior margin of the squamous part of the afterhead ; this 

 bone is of a triangular shape, the upper angle between 

 the ossa parietalia, and its horizontal diameter, being 

 twice that of the vertical. This bone coalesces at very 

 different periods with the occipital bones, sometimes 



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