10 A CRANIOMETRIC STUDY 



which I was always taught to accept as the prevailing type 

 of skull amongst North American Indians. However, Hrd- 

 licka's (^) recent work on the crania of the Eastern Indian 

 tribes of the United States has quite dispelled that idea, for 

 he found that only 10.9% of the male skulls of his scries show- 

 ed a brachycephalic contlition. Still there is no doubt that 

 the broad headed type according to Hrdlicka's map^^^ was- 

 fairly prevalent amongst the more Western Indian tribes, 

 which merged southward into the high indices of the ancient 

 Incas of Peru, and westward across the Pacific into the com- 

 paratively broad headed Polynesians and Mongolians. On 

 investigating this question in the case of other aboriginal in- 

 habitants of the Western Hemisphere, I was much struck by 

 the remarkably broad headed character of the wonderful 

 Muniz collection of ancient Inca skulls. O In Fig. 1. I 

 prepared outlines of twoO of these (Crania Nos. 15 and 18) 

 examined from above, for comparison with the Micmac skull 

 (which is shown in the middle of the Fig.). All these were 

 drawn to exactly the same scale, so as to make the degree of 

 resembance still more striking. This result is all the more 

 significant when compared with the average British cephalic 

 index which is 76, thus placing it in the sub-dolichocephalic 

 class of Broca O Again, it is possible that the Beothuck 

 aborig'nal Indians of Newfoundland O were genetically re- 

 lated to the Micmacs in some way, and in reference to this 

 point it is of interest to note that Mr. Prest C^) found the ce- 

 phalic indices of two aboriginal Beothuck Indian skulls in the 

 Museum, St. Johns, Newfoundland to be 78.45 and 80.2, 

 both of which were comparatively high. It is a well known fact 

 that there was a considerable intermingling of French Acad- 

 ian and Micmac blood, so that the high cephalic index of this 

 Micmac cranium ma}' be of some help there, as the predomin- 

 ant type of skull in France, in the Britis h Isles, and in extreme 



1) None of the3(j exhibited the artifieial deformity frequently seen in the Inca skull. I wish to 

 express riiy (jrateful thanks to Dr. J. W. Fewkes, Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology 

 for r>ermi.s>jion to publish outline tracinj;sof these two crania from the sixteenth Annual Report 

 of the Bureau of .American Ethnology, 1891-1895 



