418 MODIFICATIONS AFFECTING THE ETHNIC SIGNIFICANCE 
proportions of the human skull, as elements of classification in physical 
‘ethnology, confers a new significance on all external forces affecting 
its normal ethnic condition. Influences artificially superinduced 
upon those conditions which, in relation to all other animals, 
would be regarded as their natural state, tend greatly to complicate 
that novel department of Natural History which deals with man as its 
peculiar subject ; and in no respect is this more apparent than in the 
form of the human head. It is man’s normal condition to be sub- 
jected to many artificial influences ; and this fact must never be lost 
sight of by the ethnologist. In the rudest stage of savage life, which 
is sometimes, on very questionable grounds, characterised as a state of 
nature, man clothes and houses himself, makes and uses weapons and 
tools, and subjects his infant offspring to many influences dependent 
upon hereditary custom, taste, or superstitious obligations. All those 
tend to leave permanent results stamped on the individual, and 
when universally practised, confer on the tribe or nation some arti- 
ficial ethnological characteristics which are nevertheless as essentially 
foreign to any distinctive innate peculiarity, as tatooing, cireumcision, 
or other similar operation admitting of universal application. The 
naturalist has to deal with nothing analogous to this among the most 
ingenious and constructive of the lower animals. 
Diverse physical characteristics have been noted among the various 
tribes of mankind, but concurrent opinion points to the head and face 
as embodying the most discriminating tests of ethnic variety. Yet these 
are the very features most affected by artificial appliances. Tatooing, 
nose, lip, and ear piercing ; filing, staining, and extracting the teeth; 
staining the eyelids, shaving and plucking the head and beard, all 
effect important changes on the physiognomy. Nor is the head more 
constant in its proportions. Undesignedly and with deliberate pur- 
pose alike, artificial means tend to modify the shape of the human 
skull, and so to introduce elements of confusion and error into any 
system of classification based on cranial conformation, in which such 
sources of change are overlooked. In one respect, however the 
American ethnologist might seem to incur little risk of such oversight. 
The barbarous custom of giving artificial forms to the skull is 
practised as sedulously at the present day among the Flathead tribes 
of the Pacific, as by the Peruvians before the conquest of Pizarro, or on 
the shores of the Euxine among the Scythian Macrocephali in the 
days of Hippocrates. The effects resulting from this practice have 
