130 | ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
pressure of the Indian cradle-board. The examination and measure- 
ment of several hundred specimens of American crania, as well as of 
the living head in representatives of various Indian tribes, have 
also satisfied me not only of the existence of dolichocephalic and 
brachycephalic heads as tribal or national characteristics, but of the 
common occurrence of the same exaggerated brachycephalic form, 
accompanied with the vertical or obliquely flattened occiput, which 
had seemed to be characteristic of the crania of the Scottish tumuli. 
There are indeed ethnical differences apparent, as in the frontal and 
malar bones, but so far as the posterior region of the head is 
concerned, both appear to exhibit the same undesigned deformation 
resulting from the process of nursing still practised among many 
Indian tribes. 
The light thus thrown on the habits of the British mother of pre- 
historic times, by the skull-forms found in ancient barrows, is replete 
with interest, from the suggestions it furnishes ef ancient customs" 
hitherto undreamt of. But it has also another and higher value to 
the craniologist, from its thus showing that some, at least, of the pecu- 
liar forms hitherto accepted as ethnical distinctions, may be more cor- 
rectly traced to causes operating after birth. 
The first example of this peculiar cranial conformation which at- 
tracted my attention, as possibly traceable to other causes than inheri- 
ted characteristics, or natural deviations from the typical skull-form 
of an extinct race, occurred on the opening of a stone cist at Juniper 
Green, near Edinburgh, on the 17th of May, 1851. Soon after the 
publication of the Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, in which the special 
characteristics of the crania of the Scottish tumuli were first discussed, 
I learned of the accidental discovery of an ancient tomb in a garden 
on the Lanark road, a few miles to the north-west of Edinburgh, and 
immediately procceded to the spot. The cist occupied a slightly ele- 
vated site, distant only a few yards from the road; and as this had 
long been under cultivation as a garden, if any mound originally mark- 
ed the spot it had disappeared, and no external indication distinguish- 
ed it as a place of sepulture. A shallow cist formed of unhewn slabs 
of sandstone enclosed a space measuring three feet eleven inches in 
length, by two feet one inch in breadth at the head, and one foot eleven 
inches at foot. The joints fitted to each other with sufficient regular- 
ity to admit of their being closed by a few stone chips imserted at the 
junction, after which they appeared to have been carefully cemented 
with wet loam or clay. The slab which covered the whole projected 
