CERTAIN ANCIENT BRITISH SKULL FORMS. 151 
by actual compression, and partly by the growth of the brain and skull 
being thereby limited to certain directions. Hales, the Ethnographer 
_of the Exploring Expedition, after describing the process as practised 
among the Chinooks, remarks : “The appearance of the child when 
just released from this confinement is truly hideous. The transverse 
diameter of the head above the ears is nearly twice as great as the 
longitudinal, from the forehead to the occiput. The eyes, which are 
‘naturally deep set, become protruding and appear as if squeezed par- 
tially out of the head.”* Mr. Paul Kane in describig to me the 
same appearance, as witnessed by him on the Columbia River, com- 
pared the eyes to those of a mouse strangled in a trap. The appear- 
ance is little less singular for some time after the child has been freed 
from the constricting bandages; as shown in an engraving from one 
of Mr. Kane’s sketches of a Chinook child seen by him at Fort 
_Astoria.* In after years the brain as it increases, partially recovers 
its shape ; and in some of the deformed adult skulls one suture gapes, 
while all the rest are ossified, and occasionally a fracture, or false 
suture remains open. An adult skull of the same extremely deformed 
shape, among those brought home by the Exploring Expedition, 
illustrates the great extent to which the brain may be subjected to 
compression and malformation without affecting the intellect. 1t is 
that of a Nasqually chief, procured from his canoe bier in Washington 
Territory. (No. 4549.) The internal capacity, and consequent 
volume of brain, is 95 cubic inches. The head is compressed into a 
flattened disc, with the forehead receding in a straight line from the 
- nasal suture to the crown of the head, while the lambdoidal suture is 
on the same plane with the foramen magnum. The sutures are 
nearly all completely ossified ; and the teeth ground quite flat, as is 
common with many of the tribes in the same region, and especially 
with the Walla-walla Indians on the Columbia River, who live chiefly 
on salmon, dried in the sun, and invariably impregnated with the 
sand. which abounds in the barren waste they occupy. I assume the 
unimpaired intellect of the Nasqually chief from his rank. The 
Flathead tribes are in the constant habit of making slaves of the 
Roundheaded Indians; but no slave is allowed to flatten or otherwise 
modify the form of her child’s head, that being the badge of Flathead 
aristocracy. As this has been systematically pursued since ever the 
* Ethnography of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, p. 216. 
+ Prehistoric Man, Vol. II. p. 320. 
