DISTORTIONS OF THE HUMAN CRANIUM. 415 



iar test by a remark of the late Dr. Kombst, that he had never 

 been able to obtain an English-made hat that would fit his head. 

 He added that he believed such was the general experience of Ger- 

 mans, owing to the greater length of the English head. I subse- 

 quently found the shapes of a Yorkshire hatter to be shorter than 

 some furnished me from Dublin ; and I believe that such compar- 

 isons of the shapes most in demand in different parts of the British 

 Islands, and on the Continent, will supply important craniological 

 results. Dr. jS^ott has employed the same means in his " Compara- 

 tive Anatomy of Eaces," but only as a test of relative horizontal 

 circumference.* 



But uusymmetrical, truncated, or elongated heads may be so 

 common as apparently to furnish distinctive ethnical forms, and yet, 

 after all, each may be traceable to artificial causes, arising from an 

 adherence to certain customs and usages in the nursery. It is 

 in this direction, I conceive, that the importance of the truths 

 resulting from the recognition of artificial causes afi'ecting the forms 

 of British brachycephalic or other crania chiefly lies. The contents 

 of early British cists and barrows prove that the race with whom 

 they originated was a rude people, ignorant for the most part of the 

 very knowledge of metals, or at best in the earliest rudimentary stage 

 of metallurgic arts. They were in fact in as uncivilized a condition 

 as the rudest forest Indians of America. To prove, therefore, that 

 like the Eed Indian squaw, the allophylian British mother formed 

 the cradle for her babe of a flat board, to which she bound it for 

 safety, and facility of nursing, in the vicissitudes of her nomade life, 

 — though interesting, like every other recovered glimpse of a long- 

 forgotten past, — is not in itself a discovery of much significance. 

 But it reminds us how essentially man, even in the most degraded 

 state of wandering savage life, differs from all other animals. The 

 germs of an artificial life are there. External appliances, and the 

 conditions which we designate as domestication in the lower animals, 

 appear to be inseparable from him. The most untutored nomades 

 subject their offspring to many artificial influences, such as have no 

 analogy among the marvellous instinctive operations of the lower 

 animals. Without, therefore, running to the extreme of Dr. Morton, 

 who denied, for the American continent at least, the existence of any 

 true dolichocephalic crania, or indeed any essential variation of 



* lypes of Mankind, p, 452. 



Vol. VII. Y 



