156 SIGNIFICANCE OF ANCIENT BRITISH SKULL FORMS. 
United States ship Peaeock, in 1840, and died at New York in 
1842, the occiput, though full, is slightly vertical. The occipital 
development of the Fiji cranium is the more interesting as we are 
now familiar with the fact that an artificially flattened occiput is 
of common occurrence among the islanders of the Pacific Ocean. 
‘*In the Malay race,” says Dr. Pickering, “a more marked pecu- 
larity, and one very generally observable, is the elevated occiput, 
and its slight projection beyond the line of the neck. The Mongo- 
lian traits are heightened artificially in the Chinooks; but it is less 
‘generally known that a slight pressure is often applied to the occiput 
by the Polynesians, in conformity with the Malay standard.”* Dr. 
Nott, in describing the skull ofa Kanaka of the Sandwich Islands who 
‘died at the Marine Hospital at Mobile, mentions his being struck by 
its singular occipital formation; but this he learned was due to an 
artificial flattening which the Islander had stated to his medical 
attendants in the hospital, was habitually practised in his family. 
‘According to Dr. Davis, it is traceable to so simple a source as the 
Kanaka mother’s habit of supporting the head of her nursling in 
the palm of her hand.{ Whatever be the cause, the fact is now well 
established. The occipital flattening is clearly defined in at least 
three of the Kanaka skulls in the Mortonian Collection; No. 1800, 
a male native of the Sandwich Islands, aged about forty; No. 1308, 
apparently that of a woman, from the same locality ; and in number 
695 a girl of Oahu, of probably twelve years of age, which is mark- 
edly unsymmetrical, and with the flattening on the left side of the 
parietal and occipital bones. The Washington Collection includes 
fourteen Kanaka skulls; besides others from various Islands of the 
Pacific, among which several examples of the same artificial forma- 
tion occur: eg. No. 4587, a large male skull, distorted and unsym- 
metrical; and No. 4367, (female?) from an ancient cemetery ‘at 
Wailuka, Mani, in which the flattened occiput is very obvious. 
The traces of purposed deformation of the head among the Island- 
ers of the Pacific have an additional interest in their Pelationte one pos- 
sible source of South American population by oceanic migration, sug- 
‘gested by philological and other independent evidence. But for otir 
present purpose the peculiar value of those modified skulls lies in the 
disclosures of influences operating alike undesignedly, and with a 
well defined purpose, in producing the very same cranial conforma- 
* Pickering’s Races of Man, p. 43. 
t Types of Mankind, p. 436. 
$ Crania Britannica, Dee. III. pl. 24, (4.) 
