XX 



HEAD 



Drayton obtained the drawing of a child's head, of the Walla- 

 walla tribe (Fig. 19), that had just been released from its 

 bandages, in order to secure its flattened shape. Both the 

 parents showed great delight at the success they had met with 

 in effecting this distortion." 



Endeavours have been made to trace the origin of this 

 and many analogous customs to a desire to intensify or exag- 

 gerate any prevailing natural peculiarity of conformation. Thus 

 races in which the forehead is naturally low are supposed to 

 have admired, and then to have artificially imitated, those 

 individuals in which the peculiarity was most pronounced. 

 But this assumption does not rest 

 upon any strong basis of fact. The 

 motives assigned by the native 

 Peruvians for their interference with 

 the natural form of their children's 

 heads, as reported by the early 

 Spanish historians, were very various. 

 Some said that it contributed to 

 health, and enabled them to bear 

 greater burdens ; others that it 

 increased the ferocity of the counte- 

 nance in war. 1 These were all prob- 

 ably excuses for a blind adherence to 

 custom or the imperious demands of 

 fashion. / 



Many of the less severe alterations of the form to which 

 the head is subjected are undesigned, resulting only from the 

 mode in which the child is carried or dressed during infancy. 

 Thus habitually carrying the child on one arm appears to 

 produce an obliquity in the form of the skull which is retained 

 to a greater or less degree all through life. The practice 

 followed by nomadic people of carrying their infants fastened 

 to stiff pillows or boards commonly causes a flattening of the 

 occiput; and the custom of dressing the child's head with 

 tightly-fitting bandages, still common in many parts of the 

 Continent, and even used in England within the memory of 

 living people, produces an elongated and laterally constricted 



1 Morton's Crania, Americana, p. 116. 



FIG. 19. Flat-headed 

 Indian child. 



