142 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
cipital flattening in this class of British Crania, I feel no hesitation in 
believing to be traceable to the same kind of rigid cradle-board as is 
in constant use among many of the Indian tribes of America, and which 
produces precisely similar results. Its mode of operation, in effecting 
the various forms of oblique and vertical occiputs, will be considered, 
when describing some of the phenomena of compressed Indian crania ; 
but another feature of the Juniper Green skull, which is even more 
obvious in that from Lesmurdie, in the same collection, is an irregu- 
larity amounting to a marked inequality in the developement of the 
two sides. This occurs in skulls which have been altered by posthu< 
mous compression ; but the recovery of both the examples referred to 
from stone cists, precludes the idea of their having been affected by the 
latter cause ; and since I was first led to suspect the modification of 
the oceiput, and the exaggeration of the characteristic proportions of 
British brachycephalic crania by artificial means, familiarity with 
those of the Flathead Indians, as well as other ancient and modern 
artificially distorted American crania, has led me to recognise in 
them the constant occurrence of the same unsymmetrical inequality 
in opposite sides of the head. 
But another class of deformations, of a less marked character than 
the well-known distortions produced on many American crania, both 
by the undesigned action of the cradle-board, and by protracted com- 
pression pnrposely applied with a view to change the form, merits 
the careful attention of craniologists. The normal human head may 
be assumed to present a perfect correspondence in its two hemis- 
pheres; but very slight investigation will suffice to convince the ob- 
server that few living examples satisfy the requirements of such a 
theoretical standard. Not only is inequality in the two sides frequent, 
but a perfectly symmetrical head is the exception rather than the rule. 
The plastic condition of the cranial bones in infancy, which admits of 
all the strange malformations of ancient Macrocephali and modern 
Flatheads, also renders the infant head liable to many undesigned 
changes. From minute personal examination I have satisfied myself 
of the repeated occurrence of inequality in the two sides of the head, 
arising from the mother being able to suckle her child only at one 
breast, so that the head was Snipe to a slight but constantly re- 
newed pressure in the same direction. It is surprising, indeed, to how 
great an extent such unsymmetrical irregularity is found to prevail, 
when once the attention has been drawn to it. The only example of 
