TIIE HUMAN SPECIES. 257 



and, if they are not of foreign origin, they most assuredly are 

 startling coincidences. But that these, and nearly all other 

 invaders of the west coast, are intermixed with the flat-headed 

 aboriginals, is shown in the artificial means employed by the 

 former to' obtain the resemblance of the flat-head conformation; 

 inflicting for this purpose daily torture upon their infants, till 

 the desirod effect is produced. 



Torture, self-imposed, is indeed a part of the education of 

 most American tribes, and the habit is sufficiently indicative 

 of the small irritability of fibre they possess, in common with 

 the Mongolic and Indo-Papua races of Asia. 



If the typical Flathcads were not a distinct species of Man, 

 they were, at least, the oldest and first wanderers that reached 

 the American continent.* They appear to have possessed in 

 Peru, elements of social progress before strangers came among 

 them, provided always that the Titicaca and other remains of 

 this type represent the Peruvian people before the Incas 

 obtained the sway.t The question would certainly be more 

 doubtful, if the imitation of their cranial form had not been 

 adopted by races of strangers in both Americas, and even by 

 the aquiline-nosed hero tribes, whose portraits still adorn the 

 ruined temples of Yucatan, where they represent giant divini- 



* Natives of scattered southern islands, such as the Malccolcse, and 

 sallow Papua-Malays of some sandal-wood islands, all distinctly marked 

 with very elevated frontal bones, seem to countenance the probability that 

 there were men of this form in Polynesia, but then their frontal does not 

 appear depressed. 



t There is a statement somewhere, that the Incas permitted one or more 

 villages of Flatheads, taken during a war of conquest to the east of the 

 Andes, to settle near the capital ; but this seems to be at variance with 

 Dr. Tschudi's observations. It may be right to repeat here, that writers 

 speak often in very indefinite terms of American flat-headed tribes, there 

 being certainly three very different in form ; the first, those whose crania 

 are naturally depressed ; the second, with the occiput obliquely flattened 

 in a vertical manner (this belongs also to Peru, and is seen on the Yuca 

 tan images) ; the third is the North American, where both the frontal 

 and occiput are pressed down, bulging out laterally. See Plate I. 



22* 



