xx HEAD 333 



they refer, and also indicating variations of form in their 

 peculiar cranial characteristics. 



Kecent archaeological discoveries fully bear out these 

 statements. Heads deformed in various fashions, but chiefly 

 of the constricted, elongated shape, have been found in great 

 numbers in ancient tombs, in the very region indicated by 

 Herodotus. They have been found near Tiflis, where as 

 many as 150 were discovered at one time, and at other 

 places in the Caucasus, generally in rock tombs ; also in 

 the Crimea, and at different localities along the course of 

 the Danube ; in Hungary, Silesia, in the south of Germany, 

 Switzerland, and even in France and Belgium. The people 

 who have left such undoubted evidence of the practice of 

 deforming their heads have been supposed by various authors 

 to have been Avars, Huns, Tartars, or other Mongolian 

 invaders of Europe ; but later French authors who have 

 discussed this subject are inclined to assign them to an Aryan 

 race, who, under the name of Cimmerians, spread westward 

 over the part of Europe in which their remains are now 

 found, in the seventh or eighth century before our era. 

 Whether the French habit, scarcely yet extinct, of tightly 

 bandaging the heads of infants, is derived from these people, 

 or is of independent origin, it is impossible to say. 



There is no unequivocal proof that the custom of de- 

 signedly altering the form of the head ever existed in this 

 country, but the singular shape of a skull found in 1853 in 

 a Saxon grave at West Harnham, in Wilts, figured and 

 described in Davis's and Thurnam's Crania Britannica, and 

 now in the museum of the College of Surgeons, is apparently 

 due to such a cause. 



In Africa and Australia no analogous customs have been 

 shown to exist, but in many parts of Asia and Polynesia, 

 deformations, though usually only confined to flattening of 

 the occiput, are common. Though often undesigned, they 

 are done purposely, I am informed by Mr. H. B. Low, by 

 the Dayaks, in the neighbourhood of Sarawak. Sometimes, 

 in the islands of the Pacific, the head of the new-born infant 

 is merely pressed by the hands into the desired form, in which 

 case it generally soon recovers that which nature intended 



