414. MODIFICATIONS AFFECTING THE ETHNIC SIGNIFICANCE. 
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES OF SOME MODIFYING ELE- 
MENTS AFFECTING THE ETHNIC SIGNIFICANCE OF 
PECULIAR FORMS OF THE HUMAN SKULL. 
BY DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., 
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO. 
The antiquity and wide geographical diffusion of the practice of 
cranial deformation on the American continent, have tended in some 
degree to divert the attention of craniologists from causes, some, 
at least, of the operations of which have been long recognised in 
other departments of natural history. The palzeontologist is familiar 
with the occurrence of skulls distorted or completely flattened, and 
even with solid bones and shells greatly changed in form by com- 
pression. It was due to such compression transforming the skull of 
a fossil batrachian into some rude resemblance of the human cranium, 
that the famous Cryptobranchus Scheuchzeri, found m a quarry at 
CEningen in 1725, was announced to the world in M. Scheuchzer’s 
“* Homo diluvii testis et theoscopos,” as the remains of one of the sinful 
antediluvians who perished in the Noahic deluge! In some of 
such examples, the paleontologist looks in reality only on the cast 
of the ancient bone or shell, compressed along with its matrix, pro- 
bably at a date long subsequent to its original deposition. But in 
the following examples of similar changes affecting the human skull 
it will be seen that the distortion by which the crania now referred 
to have acquired their abnormal shapes, must have taken place at no 
long period subsequent to inhumation, while the animal matter still 
remained in such abundance as to preserve the flexibility of the bones; 
and even in some cases when the soft tissues still existed to resist the 
fracture consequent on the pressure of the superimposed weight of 
earth or stone. 
In the Museum of the University of Toronto a female skull is now 
preserved, recovered in 1859 from an ancient Indian cemetery on the 
Georgian Bay. It is marked by considerable prolongation of the 
occiput, and is essentially a dolichocephalic cranium ; but the natural 
excess in the longitudinal diameter has been exaggerated by great 
lateral compression, under which the left parietal and temporal bones, 
after being depressed and flattened, have at length partially yielded at 
the squamous suture. The head appears to have lain on the left side, 
