THE HURON RACE AND ITS HEAD-FORM. 125 



In an earlier enquiry into the specialties of the fluron skull, my 

 observations were based on the examination of twenty-nine crania 

 derived from the Huron country ; including a remarkable skull from 

 an ossuary at Barrie, on Lake Simcoe, subsequently figured and 

 minutely described in this Journal.* 



To the examples thus brought under review, I was able to make 

 further additions, so as ultimately to embrace in one table, as probable 

 Huron crania, the measurements of thirty-seven skulls obtained from 

 Indian graves in the localities to the north of the water-shed between 

 Georgian Bay and Lakes Erie and Ontario; and the greater number 

 of them from ossuaries opened within the area lying between Lake 

 Simcoe and Lake Huron, where the Hurons were visited by French 

 explorers and Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. The 

 materials thus turned to account appeared to embrace a sufficient 

 number of examples to illustrate the average proportions and relative 

 measurements of the Huron cranium, and to furnish satisfactory data 

 for comparison with those of other Indian nations. The comparisons, 

 however, were chiefly carried out with a view to test the assumed 

 Mortonian type of a uniform American head-form. Of the crania sub- 

 mitted to examination, the Barrie skull, which attracted attention by 

 its striking contract to the rest of the group, proves to be altogether 

 exceptional. Studied alone, like the famous Scioto Mound skull, it 

 would have seemed to furnish conclusive confirmation, in relation to 

 Canada, of the assumed remarkable sameness of osteological character 

 pervading all the American tribes from Hudson's Bay to Terra del 

 Fuego. Indeed the description which Dr. Morton gives of the famous 

 mound skull, as '' the perfect type of Indian conformation to which the 

 skulls of all the tribes from Cape Horn to Canada more or less approx- 

 imate," would equally apply to some of the most characteristic features 

 of the one from the Barrie ossuary. It only lacks the great vertical 

 elevation ; though this is made to appear less than it actually is, owing 

 to the unusual depression of the fossa in the foramen magnum, which 

 constitutes a fixed point of measurement. The striking agreement of 

 the two, when viewed in one most characteristic aspect, will be seen 

 from the accompanying wood-cuts. 



* Canadian Journal, vol. vii, p. 406. 



